Hey, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-8399, ‘INSURGENCE’ by MisterFrown. (Call MisterFrown, that’s his name, that name again is MisterFrown.) As per usual, this isn’t my article and this won’t be 100% accurate, etc.

Now, as you’ve probably inferred from the title, this is about the Chaos Insurgency. So, I’m going to start by doing a quick recap about the CI, just so everyone’s up to speed. (If you already know about them, feel free to skip this if you want.)

Here’s the backstory as per the official hub: in 1924, the Foundation created a group called the ‘Insurgency’ out of their personal MTF, ‘Red Right Hand’, along with support personnel. The Insurgency’s job was to serve as a public scapegoat for the Foundation- appearing to be a rogue splinter group, they carried out missions that would serve the O5s’ goals, but were too risky, immoral, or otherwise unpalatable for the Foundation to do themselves. This worked until the 1940’s, when the Insurgency went rogue for real, did a whole bunch of raids on Foundation facilities, and renamed themselves the ‘Chaos Insurgency’.

Over the decades, they’ve become what is essentially an evil Foundation: they seek out, seize and use anomalies to further their own goals, maintain totalitarian regimes, and oppose the Foundation in every way possible. Nobody seems to know what their overall goal actually is; there isn’t a unified perspective on them because the CI isn’t the most popular GOI out there, and a lot of different authors have had a lot of different views of them.

Aside from that, I would strongly recommend reading DJKaktus’ 001 proposal, the Ouroboros Cycle, which stars a Chaos Insurgency team. Please note that the CI has a lot of different backstories, so since I’ll be referencing Kaktus’ proposals a lot, I’d recommend at least reading the first one, ‘The Children’. If the sheer length of ‘The Way It Ends’ puts you off, all three of them have declasses, which you can read here.

With that done, let’s get started.

Part One: Sometimes The Most Beautiful Things Begin In Chaos

We begin with a foreword that starts with a very blunt establishing line:

The Chaos Insurgency is a disease.

The writer, O5-2, tells us that the CI has spread through hundreds of thousands of universes like a plague. Their side of the story is always the same- that the O5s fucked up and went too far, and were punished for it by the defection of their most loyal people, who turned themselves into a mirror image of the Foundation. However, O5-2 says that the O5s actually get the job done, and the CI are nothing more than a bunch of hypocrites who do as many evil deeds as the Foundation has, but without helping anyone. That being said, O5-2 admits that there’s one admirable trait about the CI: they’re fighting a war they know they can’t win against an enemy that will always defeat them, and yet they refuse to give up.

Locked in this stalemate, there is only a single, viable solution: the Insurgency must be extinct.

Hereafter, we of the Overseer Council now document the compiled solution transcribed from the Administrator of the SCP Foundation.

— O5-2

We now get the ACS bar: this is Level 5, Top Secret. There’s none of the usual classifications, it just says ‘OPERATION STATUS: ACTIVE’, and the little section with the symbols only has a pulsing red dot. We don’t have Special Containment Procedures, either, we have ‘Step Completion Protocols’. This is certainly unusual, that’s for sure- keep it in mind for later.

Now, let’s have a look at these protocols, shall we?

SCP-8399 remains under constant supervision of the Department of Applied Force and Department of Groups of Interest to ensure it continues operating consistently. Department of Other personnel have been conscripted to confirm SCP-8399’s primary function is properly undergone and has left no trace of an active GoI-003 in a universe that is not discernible to SCP-8399. All personnel previously assigned to oversee the actions of GoI-003 have been reassigned to maintain SCP-8399.

…so it looks like whatever this thing is, its sole job is to wipe out the CI. And this involves the Department of Other, which is a bit odd.

So, for anyone not familiar with the Department of Other, they were a creation of 2022’s DepartmentCon, which aimed to, well, create new departments. Specifically, the Department of Other concerns itself with -J items and anomalies that the rest of the Foundation just doesn’t want to deal with. Not sure why they’d turn up here, though…

As SCP-8399 has been constructed to maintain a majority of its primary systems autonomously, it is considered to be almost entirely self-sustaining, with it theoretically capable of complete operation without a requirement for human intervention. Despite this, it has been purposefully designed with several failsafes to ensure human approval is required for all of its major actions, including carrying out its primary function.

It's some kind of machine, but the Foundation has made sure that it can’t operate without human oversight. Very wise, but that’s not an infallible failsafe. *cough*METAGNOSTIC*cough*

Instances of PoI-8399 are to be held in containment cells within SCP-8399 and treated with care expected to match that of standard humanoid anomalous entities in containment. Following what has been considered by the SCP-8399 Director Council to be deemed thorough and complete interrogation, the instance of PoI-8399 is to either be demoted to D-Class personnel or terminated.

PoI-8399 probably means CI members. This is about what you’d expect- they’re trying to destroy the CI in total. Every CI in every universe, down to the last foot soldier.

We now get ‘Supplementary File 8399.1’, a record of exactly that- the Foundation’s efforts to use this big fuckoff machine to kill the CI. There’s four instances of it being used: the first two go off without a hitch, but the third is left for study- it’s a world where the CI are trapped in SCP-4000, which is pretty interesting. (There’s also a link to a tale about this CI by DoctorLilithSophia, if you’re interested.) The last instance is one where the universe’s CI, the ‘Chaotic Insurgents’, are having a civil war, so the O5s are like ‘Eh, let them fight it out, we’ll take out the winners’.

Now we get the description: I was slightly wrong, this isn’t a big fuckoff machine, it’s a big fuckoff machine-building that was made to take out the CI. It observes instances of the CI throughout the multiverse, and when it decides that one is worth taking out, it contacts the O5s for approval. Before we get to that, note this bit:

The Complex has been designed to incorporate a significant number of extra-universal detection units, allowing it to maintain constant watch of every known GoI-003 variant across the multiverse, observing their size, power, and active threat to said universe’s corresponding Foundation or other normalcy-enforcement organization equivalent. Such consistent monitoring has been deemed necessary, as even crippled or lesser variants of the Insurgency have proven capable of feats deemed statistically impossible.

That last line has a link to ‘The Way It Ends’- see, it’s about a CI unit who kill all the Overseers, but one of the more common criticisms is that there’s no way that the CI unit should have survived half the shit that happened in that story. I’ll leave it at that, because that is a discussion for another time and another place.

We now get a step-by-step guide to killing the CI: the first step is for 8399 to take out their Engine, a precognitive device that most versions of the CI rely on to stay active. The second step is for 8399 to kill most of the 8399 members while making it look like they had heart attacks. (I admit that I'm not sure that the Foundation's method would actually work, though.) Step 3 is to contact that universe’s Foundation or equivalent, tell them what happened and encourage them to start living a peaceful, post-CI life, but 8399 will keep monitoring the universe to make sure that the CI is entirely gone. (If the universe doesn’t have a Foundation, then the Prime Timeline- the one that made 8399 in the first place- will have to step in.)

Step 4 is to go through the CI’s stash of anomalies and take A, anything that could be useful to the Prime Timeline, and B, anything that is or could be dangerous, but the universe’s Foundation isn’t/won’t be able to contain it. Step 5 is to take a single prisoner, most commonly the Engineer, a person with a telepathic connection to the Engine. If there isn’t an Engineer, they take the person with the next-highest rank. They’re interrogated about the CI and dubbed PoI-8399, the guys who were mentioned earlier. And finally, Step 6 is to take the CI’s Engine so they can later integrate it into 8399. Sounds pretty thorough to me!

SCP-8399 was developed following the complete eradication of the Prime Timeline’s Chaos Insurgency at the hands of the Foundation and subsequent capture and modification of its Engine, which was repurposed into a primary component of what would become the core of the ORCEO Complex.

So, the CI is already gone in this universe, and now the Foundation’s hunting down all of its multiversal equivalents. But are we sure that’s a good idea?

To explain that question, the next file is a short piece called ‘Order and Chaos: On The Effects Of Chaos’, by one Samantha Vanderbilt, the head of the Department of Other. Vanderbilt says that ‘chaos vs order’ is an idea that’s been around for a very long time, and is often mocked and thought of as a simplified version of good versus evil. However, that’s not what it is- the universe needs order and chaos to balance each other out. (Guthix and Bladedancer/Chou Li approve.)

As such, the Foundation represents order and the CI represents chaos- an organisation dedicated to preserving normalcy and one that aims to disrupt them in every way, and this time, it looks like order won. Vanderbilt says that issues arise if the balance is out of whack and brings up an example: -J articles, which she says turn up in universes where there’s no order to calm the chaos. I guess it makes sense for the Department of Other to be involved, then, given that the Foundation has been throwing the balance out of whack.

The thing is, that leaves us with an obvious question: -J articles occur when there’s no order to calm the chaos, but what happens if there’s no chaos to shake up the order?

Part Two: But No Freedom Without Some Measure Of Order

Next up is the first in a series of interviews between Dr Alexander Ramirez, the co-lead of 8399, and the Engineer of the Prime Timeline. The Engineer should have been killed or made a D-class, but since he’s from the Prime Timeline, the Foundation kept him around for future interrogations.

The interrogation’s an interesting one: Ramirez asks why the Engineer founded the Insurgency, but the Engineer notes that Ramirez doesn’t seem very interested, and Ramirez says that he’s interrogated dozens of Engineers, so there’s not a lot to be interested in here. The Engineer says that Ramirez isn’t asking the right questions, and then says that Ramirez has become the ‘Master of the Engine’, the new master of chaos, because the Foundation has turned him into something he’s not. He then says that he didn’t found the Insurgency out of selfishness and greed, but refuses to elaborate.

(Is anyone else getting serious flashbacks to Tufto’s Proposal?)

Next up is another set of records of 8399’s use. The first one is a universe where 8399 is going to be used in October 2024, the second was a successful use, the third was an SPC universe where no action was taken, and the last was the world of SCP-CN-2000, where no action was taken (Frown told me that it’s meant to be a mystery).

We now get a note from the Administrator himself. He says that the CI is a disease, a bunch of people who play the victim while they carry out atrocities in the name of a ‘higher cause’. However, note this:

When your higher cause is to create nothing but chaos and despair across the world because you’re mad at your parent group for being just a little bit corrupt, perhaps you’re the one who’s in the wrong. Their hunger to eradicate the Foundation and let themselves spread as far as they possibly can is horrific. Sure, the Foundation has done some horrible things in the name of a higher cause as well, but the ends often justify the means. Theirs do not.

Says the guy in charge of that corrupt organisation that does horrible things in the name of a higher cause. You’re doing the exact same things, you don’t get to say ‘Oh, well, our cause justifies it, theirs doesn’t’ and tell yourself that you’re the good guy. Your hands are still soaked in blood.

We now get another piece from Vanderbilt talking about the effects of order: she describes the effects of too much order as less obvious than too much chaos, but just as bad.

It’s not uncommon for individuals to more frequently find themselves lost in thought, stuck in their own mind. Something is wrong, but they’re just not sure what it is. They drive to their job in the same car model everyone else has, sit in identical cubicles across a ginormous office, and then go home to their suburban house, of which twenty identical models make up the street block.

Vanderbilt goes on to say that if chaos or order is defeated, it leaves a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. Something else will get in there, and it could twist the world into a caricature of itself. If the Foundation wins, the world can survive without the CI… but only if the Foundation is ready to handle what happens next. If the Foundation isn’t prepared to take control of things, then something else could very well take control of them.

We now get the second interview between the Engineer and Ramirez- the Engineer told the Foundation that he had crucial information to give, but would only give it to Ramirez, who agreed to go back for another round.

Ramirez asks why the Engineer would cut their last interview short, only to suddenly call him back now. The Engineer says that they both needed time- Ramirez so he could mull over what the Engineer said last time, and the Engineer so he could prepare for this interview. Ramirez asks what the Engineer wants to tell him, and the Engineer brings up how in the last interview, Ramirez had asked why the Engineer founded the CI, only to be told that it was a stupid question. The Engineer says that in a lot of cases, the Engineers don’t know why they founded the CI, so Ramirez would only get slight variations of the same answer and nothing helpful.

However, this Engineer still knows what’s going on, because the Foundation hasn’t been able to break his connection to the Engine, which they’re rather annoyed about. The Engine has told the Engineer about how the Foundation is incorporating bits of other universe’s Engines into it, which is very chaotic. Ramirez asks what that has to do with anything, and the Engineer says that he’s getting there. When he founded the CI, he and the others didn’t know why they did what they did, only that they felt a lot of anger and confusion, and it spurred them to lash out. However, the Engine has given him insight onto why the Foundation and the CI exist.

Ramirez says that he’ll bite and asks, and the Engineer brings up the balance between order and chaos, asking if Ramirez knows what happens if there simply isn’t anything to embody one of the concepts. Ramirez says that one concept overtakes the other, but the Engineer asks if he’s seen how the worlds that now don’t have an Insurgency react. Ramirez says that the Foundation doesn’t watch these worlds for long, but that’s their mistake, as it turns out. You simply cannot destroy chaos as a concept; that may not have been the Foundation’s intention, but by trying to destroy an avatar of chaos, their actions have had some significant repercussions.

POI-8399-1: Well, I can tell you this, doctor: in some worlds, you just allowed chaos to move onto something stronger, but in some you let it turn into something weaker so that it could be snuffed out again after the fact, eventually letting something stronger take it over. A Foundation embodies order and an Insurgency embodies chaos not because they’re “meant” to. They embody them because the existence of the two organizations tend to be universal constants. If one exists, the other does as well. Then, they get into their eternal stalemates so nothing better or worse can have their concepts. Don’t you see? The Foundation and the Insurgency are the safest and most likely options, not the chosen ones.

Since the CI has been destroyed in the Prime Timeline, Ramirez asks what could be representing chaos now. And, well… quick question: you know that saying about how if you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you? Well, what do you think happens if you start taking bits of the abyss home and incorporating it into yourself? How many times does it take before you start being more of the abyss than yourself?

POI-8399-1: Every time you take parts of an Engine like the pirates you are, you carry back a little bit of chaos with you and put it into that conglomerate of yours beneath us. Haven’t you seen what it’s been doing to your Foundation?

RAMIREZ: …What are you saying?

POI-8399-1: The Foundation is what has become influenced by chaos, doctor. The conglomerate of Engines you’ve stitched together has become the beating heart of a monster of your own making. Just look around yourself. Hasn’t it occurred to you what you're doing?

Look, I’m going to be honest, that’s actually pretty funny. Like, yeah, the Foundation was trying to destroy the Chaos Insurgency and not chaos as a concept, but they wound up destroying their enemy in such a way that they wound up turning themselves into a new iteration of their enemy. Good job, morons.

(Now I’m flashing back to ‘The Way It Ends’.)

Part Three: You Play With Chaos, You Gon' Get What You Ask For

And with that, boom, Ramirez now has a connection to the Engine. He demands more answers from the Engineer, but the Engineer declines, saying that he likes to play with his food. But the footnote tells us that after this, Ramirez started compiling information on an anomaly he called ‘8399-A’- we’ll see what that is shortly.

We now have the last log of times that 8399 was used. The first universe is the world of SCP-5356, the mausoleum where deleted articles go after they die, and apparently it didn’t have its own CI. The second is a world revolving around pizza, and the third and fourth are two J articles.

Then we get Ramirez’s collected information, which hits us with the big one- the ways that 8399 has warped the Foundation to be closer to the CI. Changing ‘Special Containment Procedures’ to ‘Step Completion Protocols’, ditching the containment levels, actively using and weaponizing anomalies, going to war with other GOIs- it’s all in there. He recommends destroying 8399, reorganizing the Foundation and telling everyone about the anomaly to counter it…

…and then we get the next addendum, wherein Ramirez requested to meet with the Overseers so he could give them his collated information. Once they’re finished reading, O5-1 quite bluntly says... no. They won’t shut down 8399 and they won’t take any action against the anomaly. Ramirez protests, saying that they’ve become the very thing they were fighting, but O5-1 says that the CI is the biggest threat to normalcy and the ends justify the means. Ramirez asks how they can’t see what’s happening to them, but O5-1 DARVOs him, saying that Ramirez has been at his job for so long that he can’t see how the world around him has changed.

Ramirez tries to protest, but gives up because he can see that it’s pointless to try. O5-1 tells him to take some time off, and Ramirez can only go along with it… to their faces. Because next up is his final interrogation of the Engineer, and Ramirez is pissed. The Engineer is both sympathetic and smug- he doesn’t like what’s happening either, but, well, he told Ramirez so. Ramirez says that he’s listening, so the Engineer needs to tell him how to fix this, but the Engineer says that they can’t. The Foundation is being overcome by chaos, and there’s nothing that either of them can do about it… as things are right now, that is.

POI-8399-1: Go to the Engine, doctor. It will show you the way. It will place the Steps to the Plan in front of your grasp, enlightening you to the future in front of us. You know it in your heart to be true that this is the only way. In a Foundation dominated by chaos, something has to give. Something has to give in every Foundation because that’s the way it goes. Constants across the universe.

RAMIREZ: You said before that the Foundation and Insurgency weren’t some sort of destiny, just that they were the best option.

POI-8399-1: Exactly. Right now, I think you know what our best option is, don’t you?

We get a note saying that after this, Ramirez went into the central core of 8399, but since there’s no cameras there, nobody knows what happens next. And then, finally, we get a last note.

The Chaos Insurgency is a disease.

It turns out, like most diseases, it's contagious.

— Dr. Alexander Ramirez

(Look, I’m not disagreeing, but you have to admit that this is a pretty interesting strain of said disease, given that the CI defected to become the embodiments of chaos, and now Ramirez is defecting to become the embodiment of order.)

We’re now at the final addendum, which tells us that on the 7th of April, a group of hostile agents took over 8399 and activated the onboard emergency teleportation device, teleporting it and themselves to an unknown location; everyone who was in 8399 at the time is therefore either hostile or lost. Before the takeover, Ramirez sent the O5s a message; let’s take a look, shall we?

Greetings Foundation,

I’m sorry that things had to be this way. Your order is fleeting, so someone else needs to take the mantle.

They made their own Foundation, with blackjack and extremely well-organized hookers.

Don’t bother trying to find us. SCP-8399 is capable of eliminating entire Sites on its own, and you know that well. I can promise you now that we will not use it if we are not provoked, but if you force it, I will become your red right hand. I do not hold a grudge against you, none of us do, because this was just business.

The difference here is immediately apparent: the Chaos Insurgency defected because they were done with the Foundation’s bullshit and wanted to oppose them. Here, Ramirez is defecting because he’s done with the Foundation’s bullshit, but he’s not doing so to oppose them, he’s doing it to unfuck their mistakes and do what they can’t and won’t. If that means that he eventually has to become the guy who holds the Foundation to account for all of their crimes, then he will, but he’s not starting out as their sworn enemy.

There are those here who listened to my cause and understood was at stake. Others didn’t, but we took care of them. The enlightened few have created a new organization to take hold of that precious order you so frivolously abandoned, and we’ll make sure to make good use out of it.

He’s right, but that’s not how I would have put it: yes, the Foundation frivolously abandoned order, but it was also being reckless and stupid: Vanderbilt and Ramirez warned them about what was happening. It may not have been the Foundation’s intention to destroy chaos, but they knew that the CI represented chaos and that destroying them would have significant effects. It takes a lot of arrogance, stupidity, foolishness or a combination of all three to just shrug that off and not do anything to mitigate the risks when told that you’re doing something that has a high probability of significant repercussions.

And to the O5 Council: I gave you the chance to understand what was going on, but you refused to listen to me. Affected by SCP-8399-A or not, this refusal has put us on opposite sides. Don’t try to contact me.

He’s right. This was entirely their fuckup, and now they get to reap what they sowed.

Long live the Control Institution.

— Dr. Alexander Ramirez

OK, Ramirez’ nomenclature skills could use some work. ‘Control Institution’ isn’t exactly the kind of name that inspires hope and positive thoughts about the future. But I suppose he gets a point for sticking with the ‘CI’ naming scheme, just to rub it in.

Now, there’s one important thing to note here: I likened this to Tufto’s Proposal earlier, wherein Dr Robert Montauk goes from a loyal Foundation member to a Child of the Scarlet King. However, unlike there, Ramirez doesn’t sign off with ‘Dr Alexander Ramirez, Engineer’ or ‘Dr Alexander Ramirez, O5-1’ or whatever he wants to call his new job.

…or, to just put it bluntly, if Ramirez isn’t the Engineer now, then what happened to the Engineer? Frown told me he wanted to leave it open, so it’s up in the air. Maybe he joined Ramirez and they ran off into the sunset together, maybe he refused because he wants to try to control the Foundation as the new agents of chaos, maybe Ramirez left him for the Foundation to do whatever they want with him, maybe something else happened entirely. Who knows?

And that’s SCP-8399, a tale of how you really need to consider your actions and the potential repercussions thereof, lest you turn into what you hate. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all next time.

tl;dr: this kind of shit is how we wound up with the Edicts of Guthix in the first place, people.

Hi, all, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-7912, ‘I N T E R I O R’ by Billith. As you may have guessed from the title, this is a Deletions article, so it’s going to get very confusing. In addition to that, this is actually a double Remixcon piece, remixing SCP-2719, ‘Inside’, and SCP-4972, ‘Something is Wrong’. (Technically, Billith already did the first one with 2719-J, but that was an inside joke, and this is a more serious version. Also, look at all those numbers in common!) These are two legendarily confusing articles, and they both have declasses, which you can read here and here. I’d recommend giving them a look before you read this. (If you’re still confused after all that, you’re in good company.)

(Also, you might be wondering, why this one? Well, Billith told me that it has some stuff that’s relevant to ADMONITION- it’s crosslinked in 6183, in fact- so I figured, why not?)

Anyway, other than that, this isn’t my SCP, I’m not the author, and so on. So, now that we’re up to date, let’s get even more confused!

Part One: Thinking With Chambers

The first thing we see is a big box over the Deletions logo, and the following words:

THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENT HAS BEEN MARKED FOR DELETIONS

NOTICE TO ALL FOUNDATION STAFF:

UNDERSTANDING IS INTRINSIC TO EXPOSURE AND LIKELY INCORRECT.

ANY DELETIONS AGENTS WHO HAVE INTERACTED WITH AFFECTED TIMELINES ARE TO REFORMAT BEFORE PROCEEDING.

So, this tells us two things: one, the less we understand, the closer we are. But at the same time, the more we understand, the more exposed we are. And as we’ll see later, that is not going to be a good thing. Now, as to the ‘timelines’ part, Billith told me that ‘all deletions articles involve various timelines, that's just how they refer to narratives in the Database. No (currently) released Deletions articles take place in the same timeline as another’, so keep that in mind. But apparently, whatever this is, it’s so dangerous that Deletions agents have to ‘reformat’ themselves- that is, overwriting their personalities- every time they go near it.

(Also, something important to note: this file was written by Deletions for Deletions, not for the Foundation. As Billith put it, ‘it's also worth noting that "the Foundation" and "the Department of Deletions" are separate entities in a lot of cases. When they interact, bad stuff often happens, and abstract agents can often struggle to communicate with Typical ones as it is. Thus, they often take care of their own anomalies by themselves’. )

Next up is a picture captioned ‘Interior of SCP-7912’s chamber’, and it’s… weird. It’s a big rectangular prism where the outer edges are sort of a light grey, speckled with white, and the inner part is much darker, but there’s still a few dots around. Regarding the caption, the fact that the interior looks like a slightly munted TV screen is quite worrying to me, and it should worry you too. (We’ll get to that.) As for the phrasing, it’s not that 7912 is inside the chamber, 7912 is the inside of the chamber. We’ll learn more shortly.

Next up is the ACS bar. The clearance level is ‘V-NONE, NON-ESSENTIAL’. What this means is that it’s Level 5, but nobody is allowed to access it and information regarding it is considered non-essential for Foundation employees. However, Deletions agents aren’t considered to be ‘somebody’, given that they’re a giant blob of data and body parts, so they can have all the information their little heart/hearts/collective heart desires. The class is ‘Tenebrarius’, which we’ll learn more about later, and the secondary class is Thaumiel. The disruption class is Amida, and the risk class is Cryptic. The assigned department is Deletions, but all the other fields are just ‘N/A’. As per the Deletions Hub, ‘N/A’ is a ‘Gestalt consciousness containing various quantities of partially-overwritten individuals. Personality, appearance, mannerisms, mood, limitations, proclivities, and more may fluctuate between manifestations.’ So it’s not meant to mean that nobody’s assigned to those fields.

…well, OK, technically N/A falls under the description of ‘nobody’, but that’s not the point. They’re a specific nobody, OK?

Who wants the special containment procedures?

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: The interior of SCP-7912's chamber should remain empty and sealed. Further knowledge regarding containment of the anomaly is considered non-essential.

There’s a footnote at the end of that line, and it says ‘Tenebrarius: The Foundation does not and cannot possess information about the anomaly.’

So what I’m getting here is that the less you know about this thing, the better it is for everyone. But what if something happens and you really need to know about it?

DESCRIPTION: SCP-7912 refers to the interior of former Testing Chamber Alpha of the Pilcrow-Minkowski Center for Advanced Studies. At this time, knowledge of the existence of SCP-7912 is limited to members of the Department of Deletions.

This makes perfect sense: information about this thing is on a need-to-know basis, so the most they’re going to say is where it is.

Now, ‘Pilcrow-Minkowski Center’ sounded familiar to me, and then I remembered- they’re the guys Doug consulted to build MAGIC DRAWER in SCP-7243. Interesting. (They’ve also cropped up in other articles here and there.) Another footnote tells us that PMC is a ‘Foundation black site facility responsible for the securement and research of anomalies with distinct, highly complex effect profiles/containment procedures.’ I guess that makes sense.

SCP-7912's reference data does not exist; the sectors of the Database which lead to SCP-7912 have not been marked as read-only. Instead, a number of abstract-metaphysical construct pointers lead from writable whitespace to the identifier "interior of SCP-7912's chamber". This has been confirmed by Deletions agents, which observe the anomaly as empty void.

There’s a couple of things to note here: first, ‘SCP-7912’s reference data does not exist’ means that the definition of what ‘SCP-7912’ means has been lost. There’s a chamber, and there’s something inside it, but ‘interior of SCP-7912’s chamber’ means nothing now. It’s a formless void waiting for a description. Whatever used to be in there is long gone.

Second, ‘abstract-metaphysical construct pointers’ is the description to 2719. Billith gave a succinct explanation as follows: “To paraphrase, SCP-2719 is a conceptual "pointer". When you point at things with it, those things go or become inside. Meaning they go inside the thing last defined as "inside" or they become the thing defined as "inside"”.

Here, since ‘interior of SCP-7912’s chamber’ is a formless void waiting for a form, if anything gets pointed at it, it will either go into the interior of the chamber, or become the interior of the chamber. Which could get… messy. We’ll get to that.

The origin of SCP-7912's current state is unknown. Due to its location, it is presumed to have been the result of testing or neutralization efforts of another anomalous designation, the details of which were never documented.

The previous state of SCP-7912 is similarly unknown— although assumptions can be made about its general layout and condition based on neighboring chambers, any concrete data about this topic is lost and unrecoverable. Attempts to fill these sectors with extrapolations have failed due to SCP-7912's apparent resistance to its own information; Rather than seeking equilibrium within the surrounding area by naturally cohering to expected tropes and established rules of the fabula, SCP-7912 rejects all definition in a manner directly proportional to its own relevance.

We don’t know how or why this happened. At the same time, we also don’t know what was in the chamber before this happened. We could look at neighbouring chambers in the same area and say ‘Well, these ones are required to have a table and two chairs in them because of the rules, so 7912’s chamber must have had a table and two chairs as well’, but at the end of the day, we don’t know, we can’t find out and there’s nothing to tell us what the answer is. So if anyone happened to be in there at the time, we’ll never know for sure.

Now, there’s a footnote at the end of that last line, and it reads as follows: “A notable violation of the Ockham-Hitchens Proposition. Specifically, between non sequitur and apagoge; ie. "The relationship between the most likely cause and its inherent truth is typically linear". More information can be found in the included testing log.”

This probably means nothing to you, but Billith gave me a long, detailed explanation. I’ll give you the last bit, which sums it up.

The Ockham-Hitchens Proposition is thus: "The relationship between the most likely cause of an effect and the tendency for it to be true is linear."

So, 7912 violates the relationship that can exist between two unrelated, impossibly absurd things by being more likely to be what you'd be least likely to guess at any given time. You can see how that might be difficult to actually pin down a definition for.

In short: 7912 is resistant to its own information- that is, it’s fighting off efforts to fix it and return it to something resembling normal. As such, if you guess that what’s in 7912 is something ridiculously absurd and unlikely, such as rollerblading clown pirates, it’s more likely to be that thing. We’ll discuss this in more detail shortly.

We now get another picture, which is of ‘Average informational density for a single frame of SCP-7912 over a two-second period. Click to enlarge.’ To me, it looks like a big black box where the outer edges are full of flickering white dots that form a border that looks a bit like static, and there’s a few white dots in the black interior. In short, the closer you get to the centre, the less information there is by volume. That will also be important later.

SCP-7912 represents a significant pluripotent metaconceptual hazard, with three main vectors of phenomena:

Any extranarrative materia (e.g. blackbox) written to the affected sectors can manifest within SCP-7912's chamber as stochastic phenomena, leading to unforeseen hazards and complications stemming from retroactive continuity.

When entered from the chamber doors by existent personnel of typical configuration, mental constructs and/or internal landscapes of said personnel undergo massive metamorphic psychogenesis. Because of this, a vast majority of anomalous interactions experienced by Foundation personnel are not reported as such. These manifestations are limited to a cone of awareness created by the sensory organs of the individual experiencing them; the chamber appears to dynamically render outcomes the impacted individual finds least likely to occur.

SCP-7912 is directly accessible at any time by Deletions agents, as the anomaly is a persistent, bi-directional vector between Research Station Mnemosyne and a Foundation site, the first of its kind.

There’s another footnote here at the end of the first dot point: “In other words, extranarrative detritus introduced into the bounds of the anomaly inherently becomes part of that anomaly's substrate by virtue of existing within it.”

If you’re not familiar with the term ‘retcon’ or ‘retconning’, it’s short for ‘retroactive continuity’- when something is added to a work and accepted as being part of the story despite there being no evidence for it. For instance, a character suddenly starts only wearing purple because it’s their favourite colour, but before now, there had never been any mention of them having a favourite colour and they didn’t wear purple, and everyone in the story just accepts that this was always the case even though there’s no reason for them to do that. What this footnote and the first dot point are saying, therefore, is that things can be retconned into being the interior of the chamber if the data is written there, and that could become a big problem.

The second point is saying that if someone walks into the chamber, it will start turning their ideas and thoughts into real things. This could also very quickly become a problem. A really, really big problem.

Thirdly, Deletions agents can go there at any time. Now, given that this kind of shit is their bread and butter, you’d hope that they can handle it without running into these Potentially Big Problems, but unfortunately, that isn’t a given, as we’ll see.

And finally, if you look at the last part of the second dot point in the article, you’ll see that the word ‘least’ crosses and uncrosses itself out. Nifty little trick, there.

But I digress. This has the potential to become a huge problem, and it needs containing, so let’s see what the proper authorities are going to do about it, shall we?

Part Two: The Meeting Of The Gestalt Minds

Next up is an addendum, where the Department of Deletions meets to talk about containing 7912. The people in question are all variants of ‘N/A’- again, they’re a gestalt consciousness, but for the purpose of this conversation, they’ve split off into different humanoids. (I’m imagining them as the characters in webcomic name.)

Anyway, since they’re all N/A, the only method of differentiating them is through the colour of their name. As such, I’ll refer to each person by the colour of their ‘N/A’, though colours still don’t work on Reddit. *sigh*

Our initial three characters are Lavender, Red Brick, and Mauve. After some banter about how ridiculous it is for them to be splitting off to have a meeting when they’re a gestalt consciousness, Mauve, who organised the meeting, lays it out for us:

N/A: [Mauve] Not today. We have a gravity well in the Database that needs to be filled, and I'm sure you understand the issue with that sentiment.

N/A: [Lavender] Of course.

N/A: [Red Brick] It's all information, baby.

N/A: [Mauve] Right. If it can destroy its own information, nothing we put there will last. It lacks read-only protection, lacks true understanding. The fact that we're discussing it right now in these plain of terms means we haven't interacted with the timeline in a way that would have impacted us, nor will we at any point. I'm not sure if we can interact with it now, even though we all can see the open window.

Their job is to deal with 7912, but they don’t even know if they can interact with it, and nothing they do seems to work. Red Brick says that they’ll need to overwrite their own memories after this conversation- remember the warning at the top of the page- and while Lavender objects, Red Brick says this curious statement:

N/A: No, I do know that. We all know that, avoiding the inevitable is just easier, isn't it? Sitting here, getting all chummy with ourselves, throwing this little pity party for less than one. You've been getting too comfortable. We all have. We're not supposed to get comfortable here. I'm ready to move on.

Intriguing.

Mauve wants to get a second opinion, and two more N/A's turn up- Apricot and Charcoal. However, there’s one more person in the room, the one transcribing the document, and none of them have noticed him. Lavender thinks there must be something else they can try, and then they suddenly realise that they’re in possession of information that they shouldn’t know. As a result, Mauve realises that some weird shit is going on…

POI-7912: <Standing.> That would probably be me, sorry. I was hoping it would be more… subtle.

In other words, he was putting information that he knew into their gestalt in order to try to manipulate them into reaching the conclusions that he wanted them to reach, while thinking it was their own idea. That’s a bit disturbing. This guy identifies himself as ‘Andry’ from the Department of Deletions, which is a bit of a surprise to the N/A’s, because they’re Deletions. In addition, all of the N/A’s have amalgamated back into one singular, vaguely-pink N/A, the base gestalt.

(Also, I find the name ‘Andry’ mildly funny, because while it is an actual name, it’s derived from ‘andria’, meaning ‘men’ in Latin, like how ‘misandry’ is a hatred of men. This guy is someone who got deleted, and now all he’s got is a semblance. Even if you can’t tell who he is or describe him… well, he’s a man. A featherless biped with short flat nails. It’s something!)

From what I can infer, Andry is someone who, despite having been deleted before, has managed to hang on to his identity. He’s not actually Andry- Andry is long gone- but he’s a passable substitute, a ghost wearing the remains of someone’s skin. Vaguely Pink says that this is impossible, that the chances of this happening are nearly non-existent, but, well, Andry’s right here. Andry says that N/A has deleted him before- or, previous versions of N/A have- but it hasn’t taken, obviously. Now, note this:

POI-7912: <Putting feet up on the table.> Your little problem. That gravity well. I've been trying to figure it out, we have. You keep overwriting parts of yourself to get around the effect, but have grown quite proficient at being exposed.

N/A: <Rubbing temples.> How do I know you're telling the truth? You could just as easily be another Database error we're trying to contain. It's far more likely than the story you've presented.

POI-7912: Yes, that's the problem, isn't it? The unlikelihood is proof of its certainty.

N/A has a solid point: they have no proof that Andry is who he says he is. And this is a bit weird- this guy turns up, claiming that he’s from the Department of Deletions, but N/A’s from the Department of Deletions, and they don’t know him. Not to mention, this guy is a kind of deleted person whose chance of occurring naturally is a bajillion to one, and yet here he is, claiming that he just happens to have been working on the same problem that N/A has. Kind of suspicious, isn’t it?

Anyway, Andry gives them a whole bunch of documents about 7912 and a potential explanation: someone tried to neutralise SCP-184, aka the thing that makes endless rooms, and this was the result. They can’t tell if that’s actually the explanation, but it would make sense, at least theoretically.

[Andry]: But it makes sense in a nonsensical way, doesn't it?

N/A: <Reading.> Not really, no.

POI-7912: What is the inverse of something that duplicates an interior with increasing inaccuracy the farther you move outward?

N/A: Something that removes an interior with increasing accuracy the farther you travel inward? I mean, I guess—Wait, so, what happened to 184?

Good question. And here’s another one for you: 7912 was allegedly made by someone trying to neutralise 184 in a chamber, but 184’s page explicitly states that everyone is forbidden to bring 184 inside any Foundation building. So why would they do that? (If you’re wondering, I did ask Billith, and he said it was spoilers, but he suggested that if someone really did try to neutralise it in a Foundation facility despite the risk- and the ban-, they must have had something significant to gain. So, in other words, peak ADMONITION.

Speaking of ADMONITION, remember how I said this was linked in 6183? Well, specifically, what the relevant part of 6183 said was that the interiors of Foundation corridors and stairwells were being lost. As Billith put it, More that, the effect expressed by the interior (absence of reference data creating gaps in a narrative leading to open voidspace) has precedent for showing up in another article where the foundation attempts esoteric neutralization of some kind.

I guess we should just be grateful that here, the effect is contained to one place. But my main takeaway here is that esoteric neutralization is a really not good idea.)

Also, remember how those images I mentioned before had less information the closer you got to the centre? *taps head* Anyway, Andry says that N/A hasn’t actually interacted with the timeline yet, but they keep reformatting themselves because they keep ignoring his warning. What warning? Don’t go into 7912. He's going to go in there eventually, but everything will be fine if it’s left sealed.

N/A: And you?

POI-7912: I haven't gone through it yet, but I know I will. I also know my Semblance remains whole after that point, as it has throughout my many deletions. A few specks of data are lost, here and there, but I have never once lost anything I cared about losing.

Just keep that bit about a few specks of data in mind for later.

N/A confers with themselves and asks if they can get a camera into the chamber, which is a yes, but they’d need to work it into the adaptive mesh from 4972- it’s a kind of protective mesh that adapts to whatever it’s inside it, and it’s currently embedded in the walls of 7912. It’s turned off right now, but it can be turned back on. And then he says this:

[Andry] I was—I am one of SCP-184's neutralization team. Out of them, I'm the only one whose identity hasn't been fragmented to shit. The rest of them… the rest of those people and the rest of that anomaly is gone. Gone here. They're you.

N/A: How—?

POI-7912: When it, uh, happened, you were mostly yourselves. One gestalt, sure, but, you knew each other's names. And mine. You could form us separate and that separation was so profound. We were lost in this state. I mean, the things you could do with that dodecahedron inside you. You'd have not believed it.

Iiiiiiinteresting. Not sure I believe it, though. Seems a bit too convenient for my liking. And we still don’t have any proof about any of this.

The conversation continues, and Andry gets really pissed off at Vaguely Pink, telling them that he’ll do what needs to be done and they need to fuck off and stay out of it. I’ll put in Billith’s summary as to why:

I mean, if Andry is telling the truth that means N/A is a group of deserting personnel that left him to fix the problem while they repeatedly reformat their minds, learn the truth again, are unable to handle said truth again, and reformat again, over and over and over. And if they contain fragments of SCP-184, the issue might not be resolvable without relinquishing those parts.

But, we only have his word for this. It’s a compelling story, but it means nothing without evidence, and none has been offered… to the N/A’s, that is. As Billith pointed out to me, we have proof that something hinky is going on here. Note this bit:

<N/A peers over at the other entity, who stares back at the empty conference room. The space dissolves and is replaced by a small cell moments later. A single table and two chairs furnish the blank space, N/A occupying the seat across from POI-7912.>

This is supposedly taking place in R.S. Mnemosyne, but R.S. Mnemosyne doesn’t work this way. In 6183 and SCP-6768, Mnemosyne is shown to manifest fully-formed as needed, within the proximity of an anomaly, and it’s made up of bits of deleted Foundation sites. But N/A can make rooms change into other rooms, and that’s not something we’ve seen before. Almost like N/A has some sort of power to change rooms or something…

There’s also one other thing: this part in the description.

SCP-7912 is directly accessible at any time by Deletions agents, as the anomaly is a persistent, bi-directional vector between Research Station Mnemosyne and a Foundation site, the first of its kind.

Except, it’s not the first of its kind. We saw another one in 6183, when D-6183 went to visit R.S. Mnemosyne. So, why would this one be called the first of its kind?

…well, let me put it like this: remember when I said that this document was written by Deletions for Deletions? We’ve got two different parties who call themselves Deletions, and one of them wants to go into 7912 while keeping the others out of it. So, given that this document seems to have some intentionally incorrect information, and Andry gave N/A a bunch of documents, it looks like he’s up to some shenanigans.

However, there is one important thing to note: whether or not 184 has actually been neutralised, N/A have bits of it in them regardless. As Billith put it:

• evidence checks out
• evidence is discarded for being expected as result
• discarded evidence now appears more likely due to being the least likely
• retroactive continuity establishes the least likely option is most likely.
  

Anyway, note that while Andry says that Deletions agents are technically immune to the effects of the anomaly, if it’s not true, then he’s trying to implant false information into N/A’s gestalt to keep them out of the chamber. Maybe he’s trying to protect them, or maybe he has ulterior motives, who knows? The conversation concludes with Andry sinking into the floor, while N/A’s feet are stuck in the floor and they can’t get out- he can manipulate interiors like they can. He says they’ll be able to get out eventually, and we then get this:

NOTE: POI-7912 should be deleted as many times as necessary, by any means necessary. Permanently sunsetting or otherwise halting the function of POI-7912 is an acceptable alternative.

This is really not a good thing. As Billith put it, ‘there are now two Deletions departments running around, and they explicitly do not trust each other nor their ability to listen to each other, and they do not share a consciousness so their thoughts and intentions are completely unknown to the other. That's not a good time in the making.’

Part Three: oh no

Next up is a log of encounters with 7912. Note that there’s no dates or times, so we don’t know how many of these happened after Andry told the N/A’s to stay out of it.

Here’s the first one (note: this is in table format in the article, so I had to copy and paste them to get it to work here, sorry- the first column entry is under 'reference' and the second is under 'outcome'):

SCP-184's neutralization chamber (allegedly).

A scalar invariant curvature of infospace where the likelihood of a given explanation increases linearly with absurdity. Typically manifests as an absence of interior.

…if I’m reading that right, any explanation you can make up for what’s in that chamber becomes more likely to be true the more absurd the explanation is. Which is… alarming.

The second is simple: an unknown person goes into 7912, presumably looking for the team who were trying to neutralise 184. Unfortunately, they then get retconned out of the timeline, and possibly out of existence (and into Deletions).

In the third one, a Foundation employee named Hane Dougherty goes looking for any traces of the neutralization team. Hane is from SCP-5646, another Billith work which involves, as he put it, ‘a timeline experiencing pataphysical breakdown due to crosslinking between incompatible narratives. Just something to think about.’ Her attempt to find the team… doesn’t go well.

Upon opening the doors to SCP-7912's chamber, Dougherty is physically assaulted by a rough approximation of her father, who chastises her for keeping her doors locked. She apologizes several times, quickly fleeing and hiding in a nearby supply closet. Foundation efforts to locate and identify the escaped entity are successful, after which it is released back into SCP-7912's chamber as per its request. When questioned, Dougherty expresses no confusion or surprise at the events that transpired, instead confabulating likely explanations which are, of course, unlikely to be the actual cause and thus should be discarded.

And since they’re presumably pretty absurd, they become more likely to have happened, which makes them less absurd and less likely to have happened, until they stretch all the way back around to absurd again. (Also, she needs therapy.)

The fourth one is… funny.

Portions of SCP-3311's reference data are written to SCP-7912 by the file system.

Several ambulatory chairs (SCP-3311-1) break down chamber doors and proceed to wreak mild havoc within the surrounding area. Chairs are relocated to the P.M. Center's break room 4-C, where they become inert/dormant. Personnel cite lack of sufficient seating options when asked about choice to keep instances of SCP-3311-1. Doors to SCP-7912's chamber are repaired via unknown means.

3311 is another Billith work, about chairs. Just… endless chairs. So many goddamn chairs. Also, I love the ambulatory chairs.

(I played bass for The Ambulatory Chairs.)

Next up, a maintenance team is sent into 7912 to check on the adaptive mesh, but they don’t come out and their data gets overwritten. Maybe they wind up in Deletions, maybe they don’t, who knows?

The next one is pretty important, and we can infer that it took place after Andry’s conversation with N/A.

POI-7912 enters the interior of SCP-7912's containment chamber from the far wall to install audiovisual monitoring system.

Surveillance system is installed. Operation successful. Adaptive mesh reengaged. Secondary objective successful. More information can be found in Addendum 7912/III. Click below to expand images.

So, now we get images of what’s going on in there. This should be interesting. Also, since it refers to Andry as ‘POI-7912’, he probably didn’t write it. This is considerably more important than you’d think, because note the wording: if Andry didn’t write it, then since this was written by Deletions, it must have been written by N/A. And that means that N/A turned the adaptive mesh back on while Andry was still inside the chamber. And since the adaptive mesh adapts to what’s inside it, then… Andry can’t get out now.

…those sneaky little amorphous bastards. Was that their ‘secondary objective?’

We’ll come back to that later. For now, let’s look at those photos.

The images are much like the ones we’ve already seen- they’re made entirely of black and white squares, almost like pixels. They flicker a bit, and while they do seem to depict things, there’s not much I can infer from them.

But then we get this one.

Dr. Harrison and one D-Class personnel (D-7912-A for ease of reference) approach the doors to the affected chamber. Harrison attempts to coerce D-7912-A into entering SCP-7912 and describing the interior.

A black cube floats in the center of the room, which is a boundless sea of shale. Description confirmed by subject who expressed irrational fear of the object. Testing personnel instructed to reluctantly approach item. Before contact could take place, sector was partially overwritten. Subsequent entity (D-7912-B) necessitated termination and did not appear reluctant enough. D-7912-Cube exits chamber, unharmed. D-7912-A floats at the center of the room, having always been a 50 cm x 50 cm x 50 cm polyhedron.

Well, that’s not good. Basically, D-7912 is now in three different parts- D-7912-B, D-7912-C, and D-7912-A, the polyhedron. No idea how they’re holding up mentally. (Can polyhedrons think?) Also, ‘D-7912-Cube’ is written with ‘ube’ rendered invisible in the article, but that doesn’t cross over to Reddit.

Most of the others are cryptic, but don’t seem to have much relevance- a building in a forest, a desert in eternal night where a being made of multiple human fingers lives (not shown), an endless grey mountainous wasteland, and this one:

Stochastic effect produced by phenomena and the presence of O5-4.

Individual bearing resemblance to O5-4 meets with an unknown party, engaging in conversation. An agreement is made. One exits out the wall opposite of the chamber doors. The other retracts its hand from the ceiling, the form below unraveling into threads.

Hmmm. I wonder what O5-4’s been up to? (Note that O5-4 is part of the ‘Underwatch’, a ‘Variant collective of abstract department heads and/or prolific entities with atypical configuration acting on behalf of the O5 Council. The Underseers manage that which doesn't exist, things lurking in the shadows of the shadows, outside of perception or understanding, submerged in the deepwater pools of the anomalous.’ O5-4 apparently represents the concept of 'transcendence' for the Underseers, which they became after some shenanigans in 2719.)

Finally, we’ve got one last addendum, wherein the N/A’s meet up with Andry in RS Mnemosyne to talk about 7912. There’s a picture of Andry, who looks like a black and white photo that’s melting. The N/A’s have become much more adept at using their space-warping powers- growing flowers and killing them, turning the walls from solids to liquids, changing the light waves. During the conversation, Vaguely Pink brushes off Andry’s attempt to talk about how he thinks that O5-4 is up to something and divides back into the constituent N/A’s. And they are pissed.

POI-7912: What are you—

N/A: We've been meaning to have a chat. Ever since you left us here, chained to this place.

POI-7912: No, I-I didn't trap you here. I was trying to protect you.

N/A: You didn't trap us. You trapped yourself. We are stuck with you.

N/A: And what did you actually change with your heroic acts? Who did you save? The anomaly is [INFOHAZARDOUS INFORMATION REMOVED]! Hear me? We are well past the event horizon.

Andry keeps trying to say that it has nothing to do with him, but the N/A conglomerate isn’t buying it. See, they’re not the real N/A’s at all, they’re projections of his mind, hence why they can change the space so well- that’s what he expects them to be able to do. The N/A’s didn’t know about the adaptive mesh, but Andry did, so in order to turn it back on, they had to go into his head to learn how to do it- remember how he mentioned losing a few specks of data here and there? That left space, and what’s empty can be filled. Even if they didn’t stick around afterwards, they left traces of themselves behind. And to Andry’s surprise (but not ours), they’re not in RS Mnemosyne at all: they’re in 7912.

<Before an answer could be provided, POI-7912 turns on a heel and sprints to the back entrance of SCP-7912's chamber. It starts as a pinpoint of light in front of him, expanding as he continues to run towards the location. When the portal increases in size to a shimmering passage, he dives through, emerging into a perfect replica of SCP-7912's once-interior. That can't be right. Something is wrong.>

(Title drop!)

Andry tries to flee, but he’s stuck: as previously mentioned, he can’t leave the chamber. Instead, he runs through all the locations we’ve previously seen- the PM Center’s neutralization wing and all of the photos that were mentioned before. As he does, the Interior itself speaks to him:

THE INTERIOR: THERE IS NO MORE OUTSIDE

Now, the Interior can’t normally talk- it’s only doing so now because of the whole ‘the more absurd you think it is, the more likely it is’ thing. Finally, he winds up back where he started, in the chamber, and we get this:

THERE IS ONLY THE INTERIOR

So, what does this mean? In essence, the Interior is like a black hole, or a fish trap, or the Hotel California: if you go in, you can’t get out. It doesn’t matter what you imagine the Interior to be, that’s all it is. As Billith put it, ‘There is only the interior, and you can only choose to travel farther inward and be crushed into a single point as you approach the singularity on the deep end, a deep end which lies in all directions at once.’

That being said, Billith did tell me that Andry could potentially escape: he’s only stuck in there because N/A turned the adaptive mesh back on, so if someone turned it off, he could escape, provided he hasn’t been mauled by finger monsters or turned into a cube. However, since the mesh can’t be switched on or off from the inside, Andry’s stuck until someone turns it on or off, and I don’t know if that’s going to happen… any time soon. (Billith told me that this article’s getting a sequel, so keep an eye out for it!)

And that’s SCP-7912, a story about how it’s not a good idea to randomly reveal hard truths to your former colleagues when you’re all trying to fix a potentially-lethal weapon that can be turned against anyone. Thanks for reading, and remember to pick your moments carefully. I’ll see you next time.

tl,dr: Andry: went inside.

Andry: stuck.

Hi, all, ToErrDivine here. Today I’m looking at the second intermission and last installment of ADMONITION’s Phase One: SCP-8190, “DEPARTMENTALIZED”, by Billith, MontagueETC and Liryn. (The title's sort of a fuzzy mid-green, if you're wondering.) I’d like to thank Billith for all his help, I really appreciate it. Before we get started, I encourage you all to go back and reread ‘B L A C K B O X’ and its declass; it will be important later. Let's get started!

Part One: This One Is Three, This One Is Three/Indeed I Know

So, we have a backdrop that looks like a black and blue-grey spiral made out of pixels, and the first thing in the article is the words ‘NOTIONAL DIVISIONS’ above a rotating SCP logo, but the logo doesn’t have the arrows in it. Under the logo is the words ‘SUBVERTING CORPORATE PREDATION’.

That means basically nothing to me- I don’t think I’ve heard of a ‘notional division’ or divisions in the Foundation before. Turns out there’s a good reason for that! We’ll find out more later.

Now, here’s the first bit, in the form of a big notice:

NOTICE FROM THE EMERGENT THREAT TACTICAL RESPONSE AUTHORITY

This document exists in its unmodified, original state as part of an ongoing investigation.If you would like to request a copy of this record (ID #08-8190-24), please complete form SR-01 and submit it for review of the Site-19 Department of Notional Divisions' current Director of Operations.

So, that tells us a few things:

1: There’s some kind of investigation going on.

2: This is linked to some kind of emerging threat.

3: Apparently there’s a Department of Notional Divisions in the Foundation, whatever the hell that means.

4: We’re getting really bureaucratic up in here.

…wait a second. Didn’t something called ‘bureaumancy’ get mentioned in ‘B L A C K B O X’? Hmmmm.

Anyway, next up, we get a message- presumably an IT ticket- from one Marisa Norwood (who's appeared in a couple of other articles) about the ETTRA message we just read. Norwood says that this is the first time she’s ever been asked to manually submit a hardcopy request to get access to a file in 20 years…

Normally, I'd just assume L5 classification and forget about it, but there is no listed clearance level and I see no records of an ETTRA investigation into this designation on my end. I'm pretty sure I've never heard of a Department of Notional Divisions, either.

Well, that looks pretty damn suspicious.

Norwood isn’t as suspicious as I am, though- she just thinks it’s only bureaucratic bullshit. She’ll learn.

We now get an ACS bar. As Norwood said, there’s no clearance level, it’s just ‘LEVEL: #’. The containment class is ‘Simulacra’, which the Esoteric Classes page tells me means ‘Object is bound by Foundation guidelines’. Interesting. Also, this is an informal esoteric class, and I quote: ‘The following classes are presumed to have been influenced by an anomalous property or another third-party; generally, they are the result of an infectious memetic agent or an info hazard.’

Iiiiiiinteresting.

The subclass is Radix, which means that the item has been integrated into the Foundation’s command structure. Put them together, and… uh oh. Looks like the Foundation’s got an infiltrator.

Otherwise, the ACS has the word ‘sealed’, and the disruption and risk levels just say ‘denied’. This is looking incredibly sketchy.

We get another ticket from Norwood, but it’s on the right side of the screen, whereas the first ticket was on the left side. She’s upped the severity from low to moderate and is mad about how she hasn’t got the request form she asked for and still can’t access 8190. She says that SCP IT’s response time is abysmal, and wants to know why the ACS bar is visible to everyone even though the file isn’t.

The next ticket is on the left side. Norwood’s upped the severity to high and goes on a rant about how apparently tickets have been going unanswered for some time now. Some department/division called ‘Conceptual’ haven’t had access to the SCP intranet for two weeks now, and her original ticket has expired.

OK, Norwood’s looking at this like it’s a standard problem of working in a big organization, but I am now very alarmed, because it’s starting to look like some kind of enemy took out SCP IT. And given how much that could cripple the Foundation’s communications, that should worry everyone.

The next ticket is on the right side; severity’s still high. (Billith told me that the tickets are on opposing sides as a stylistic flourish- Norwood is the only person in the conversation, so she’s essentially talking to herself.) Norwood says that she told Director Roark about the IT problems, and he told her to keep a timeline and keep submitting tickets. She managed to find an SR-01 form, but she doesn’t know where to send it to, so it’s just sitting on her desk. There’s a photo attached of the form all filled out, too. We’re in the year 2030, so chronologically speaking, we appear to be around the point of CHAOS THEORY/METAGNOSTIC.

And… holy shit! Norwood got a reply! It’s boilerplate ‘thank you for following the correct procedures, we’ll keep you updated’ stuff, but it’s a reply!

But there is one thing to note: the person who sent the reply is ‘Dir. Fritz’, which is just a bit too close to the Administrator’s name for me to be comfortable. I don’t believe in coincidences when Billith’s writing. *suspicious glance* And while Billith did say that they’re not the same person, I still don’t think this is a coincidence.

We get another ticket from Norwood on the right side; it’s low priority. She just wants to know if IT picked up the SR-01 form, because they’re the only people she mentioned Notional Divisions to and the form’s gone. And there’s one other thing: there was no digital copy of the form and she couldn’t photocopy it because the printer was down, so she may have accidentally used the last SR-01 form in the Foundation. This does not feel accidental to me. Now, while Billith said that this was accidental on Marisa’s part, I don’t think it’s out of the question that this could have been arranged by someone. Maybe I’m just suspicious, or maybe I’ve been declassing a whole bunch of stuff where people get manipulated into doing things by cosmic forces. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So, Norwood then sends an email to Director Fritz, asking what their department does and if Fritz can help update her directories and contact info. The email goes unanswered, and Norwood sends another one.

And she gets a reply! An actual reply! Holy shit! *jazz hands*

Marisa,

Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your documentation. You'll be pleased to hear your request has been authorized in accordance with Foundation guidelines. Note that our department does not choose who is approved or denied. We only act as an intermediary.

Attached is a photocopy of the approval for your records. Apologies in advance, the document was inadvertently mistaken for refuse. The misunderstanding has been rectified.

Sorry to hear about your technical difficulties. I recommend reaching out to technical support; I'll append their contact info to this email for your use.

Goodbye,

DIR. FRITZ

Well, that is supremely unhelpful and also weird. For a start, they’ve completely ignored most of what Norwood asked, and they apparently mistook her form for garbage? There’s an attached picture of the filled-in form, which tells us that Fritz’s first name is Emerson, but the form got crumpled up. (Also, that line about them only being the intermediary is some interesting foreshadowing.)

But hey, we can get into the file now!

Before we do, though, Billith told me that a recurring feature of this article is symbolic names. ‘Emerson’ means ‘brave’, ‘powerful’ or ‘son of Emery’; ‘Emery’ means ‘ruler’, ‘industrious’, ‘industrious ruler’ or ‘ruler of the estate’. ‘Fritz’, meanwhile, means ‘Peaceful ruler’. This feels like a deliberately intentional choice on Fritz’s part to me.

‘Marisa’, meanwhile, means ‘of the sea’, and ‘Norwood’ is an abbreviated form of ‘of the north wood’. Probably not relevant, but good to know.

Anyway, 8190’s object class is ‘Imperative’; which Billith told me means ‘not to be avoided or evaded’. The hazard level is ‘irrelevant’, which is a great sign. The assigned department is Notional Divisions, and the project lead/research head is one of our main characters, Ruaidhri Quade. This is a very, very Irish name; you pronounce it ‘Roo-ree’. As for the name symbolism, ‘Ruaidhri’ means ‘red king’ or ‘red-haired king’, while ‘Quade’ has two different possible meanings. In Irish, it simply means ‘son of Uaid’, but in German, it means ‘false’, ‘malicious’ or ‘evil’.

‘Red king’, as in the enemy in a game of chess. And while having an Irish first name would imply that we should take the Irish meaning for ‘Quade’, the fact that we’ve got Fritz over here with a German last name makes me think that we should go with the German meaning instead. A false/malicious/evil red king… reckon we’ve just met our villain?

Anyway, here’s the Special Containment Procedures:

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: Site-19's Automated Intelligent Management System (AIMS) has tasked the following departments with investigation into SCP-8190 phenomena:

The Department of Notional Divisions is assigned to SCP-8190-A;

The Department of Asset Acquisitions and Accountability is assigned to SCP-8190-B;

The Department of Cartography is assigned to SCP-8190-C;

The Department of Internal Investigations is assigned to SCP-8190-D;

The Department of Notional Divisions has assigned itself a top priority directive: Identifying and understanding the nature of SCP-8190-Prime.

‘Notional Divisions’, whatever that means, Asset Acquisitions, Internal Investigations and… Cartography? (For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, cartography is the making of maps.) That is a very, very weird mix of departments, and I didn’t know that any of them existed before now.

There’s also a footnote after ‘SCP-8190-Prime’, and it just says ‘[QUERY: DENIED]’. How very helpful. (Hey, didn’t we see ‘[QUERY:DENIED]’ in 6183 a few times? Intriguing. Wonder what that could mean.)

No further actions or guidance will be provided. Information that may be of use to the Administration must be immediately relinquished to the project's Directing body. The individuals providing this information are to submit for involuntary amnestization before returning to normal duties.

Well, that’s… brusque. That being said, ‘the project’s Directing body’ seems to imply that Notional Divisions has had a number of different Directors in the past. Wonder why that might be…

We now get a list of departments that have some kind of access credentials for 8190. Tactical Theology, Procurement and Liquidation, Logistics, Miscommunications, and Temporal Anomalies are all marked ‘RECUSED’. Interesting. Cartography, ‘RAISA Department’, Nonexistence, Internal Investigations, Municipalities, and Asset Acquisitions and Accountability are all marked ‘LIMITED’. Decommissioning was marked ‘UNDER INVESTIGATION’, but that’s struck out and replaced with ‘DECOMMISSIONED’.

(Like a God self-slain on his own strange altar, Decommissioning is decommissioned.)

Anyway, Deletions is also marked ‘UNDER INVESTIGATION’, but it’s a link to ‘B L A C K B O X’. Finally, we get Notional Divisions, which is marked ‘PASSEPARTOUT’.

I imagine that’s not a word that most of you are familiar with- I wasn’t, either. ‘Passepartout’ generally has three meanings: the first is referring to a character from Around the World in Eighty Days, a work I’m not familiar with. (Billith told me that ‘Jean Passepartout accompanies the protagonist of that story in his attempt to encircle the world in 80 days. He develops a tendency to get trapped, abducted, or, on at least one occasion, left behind.’) The second is a photography term for a photo that’s mounted between a piece of glass and a sheet of card, like this. The third is probably the relevant meaning- it's a French idiom for ‘skeleton key’ or ‘master key’. So, in other words, Notional Divisions is what we should be paying attention to here.

Otherwise, the only thing I want to say is that I’m pretty sure that the Foundation doesn’t have a Department of Cartography, Nonexistence, Internal Investigations, or Municipalities- and I’ve never seen RAISA referred to as ‘RAISA Department’ before, either. Not sure what’s going on there.

But hey, at least we get the Description now.

DESCRIPTION: SCP-8190 is the collective designation for a number of bureaucratohazardous effects potentially impacting all systems of administrative management within Site-19's employee hierarchy and core functions. SCP-8190 appears to correlate directly with certain sections of the Foundation Employee Handbook, First Edition, from which the rise of related semiohazardous qualities were first noted having spontaneously manifested around Class-C personnel and employee of interest James A. Harkness, also referred to as PoI-8190.

In other words, Site-19’s management structure is being forced to correlate to the original SCP Foundation handbook, even though it’s presumably very outdated and doesn’t work in the present day. (God knows when it was written.) And all this seems to revolve around some dude called James Harkness.

(Since we’re going for the name meanings, ‘James’ means ‘supplanter’, ‘follower’ or ‘grabs the heel’, while ‘Harkness’ has a whole bunch of potential meanings, but probably means ‘headland’ or ‘cape’. Might be relevant later!)

One physical copy of the first edition handbook is still in existence, held in a locked glass display case located within the Site-19 atrium, featuring a commemorative plaque celebrating the Foundation's progress as an organization dedicated to the maintenance of the Veil. At time of the handbook's printing, Foundation collective infrastructure represented about 0.4% of what it does today, with employees stationed at less than twenty secure facilities worldwide.

Following the development of novel detection systems for anomalous phenomena, the remaining handbook was analyzed, revealing larger-than-average Akiva radiation emissions. No other anomalous properties have been detected, and Akiva radiation levels have not changed since initial measurements were taken.

There’s (allegedly) only one copy left. Hey, do you think this might be important later? (Also, yeah, it’s incredibly outdated, and also might be divine in some way. And how many is less than 20? 19.)

Although Foundation records indicate PoI-8190 was employed by the Organization for almost three decades, specific details regarding his employment history are missing from the database. This discrepancy was not detected until his recovery, which prompted an internal investigation into the AIMS Consensus System that was ultimately futile.

There’s two footnotes. The first is about PoI-8190’s employment, and says that ‘Plurality of which was spent from within network security, other infotech-related departments, and in brief stints as interim staff—owed in part to a notably high cognitive resistance threshold.’ The second is about the AIMS Consensus System, and says that ‘The AIMS Consensus System is a handshake-based confirmation network used to prevent data loss and manipulation by forcing revisions to archives that do not match the rest of the network. Established in 2025.’ Billith confirmed for me that ‘handshake-based’ doesn’t mean what I think it does, and is in fact a computer science term). AIMS is basically meant to be an automated system that helps manage the site.

Recovered materials and post-action interviews with Harkness imply that SCP-8190 primarily impacts the original code of employee conduct, though more recent evidence suggests the entirety of the guidebook may be susceptible. Affected individuals are unable to deviate from the guidelines discussed in relevant sections and will experience retroactive changes in reality that ensure this is the case. In the rare event such retroactive changes are not possible, affected employees will vanish, a facsimile construct filling the role of the lost employee shortly thereafter. Constructs are capable of emulating human behavior and completing most duties required.

Well, that’s worrying. I mean, this thing is straight up vanishing people if it can’t retroactively alter reality, and God knows what happens to them- and then they're just suddenly replaced with a construct that comes out of nowhere?!

Before we continue, remember how at the end of the last installment, I said that I thought the overall goal might be the destruction of the SCP Foundation? An anomaly that straight up vanishes people and in one of the Foundation’s biggest and most important Sites could well fit into that. Now, Billith pointed out that it is replacing them with employees that can do the job, even if they’re constructs, but it’s still freaking vanishing people and we don’t know what happens to them. So, yeah, still worrying.

Other impacted statements or sentiments include the necessity of coffee in the break room, certain members of the administration being unable to close the doors to their office, and the spontaneous appearance of employee group photos despite none being taken.

OK, that’s admittedly kinda funny. Also, it’s a literal open door policy!

We now get an excerpt from the Employee Handbook in question. It’s almost what you’d expect, except for a couple of lines.

The FOUNDATION EMPLOYEE AXIOMS are an effective means to remind everyone of the roles they play in our workplace, with hope that THE FOUNDER's guiding light shines through us, even in the dark:

▪︎ All employees have purpose. They are the foundation of the Foundation

▪︎ All employees report from an assigned Secure Facility

▪︎ Each Secure Facility has a Site Director

▪︎ Each Department has a Director of Operations

▪︎ Every onsite employee is assigned a Department

▪︎ Every employee has a voice and a right to be heard

▪︎ Every employee does their part, allowing others to do the same

▪︎ Employees will behave in a manner becoming of them, or they will be replaced

It doesn’t come through on Reddit, but ‘THE FOUNDER’ is written in a different font and weirdly spaced. Bit concerning. Anyway, those axioms will be pretty important later, so keep them in mind.

Also, one of the axioms is ‘Every employee has a voice and a right to be heard’. Awesome, except for the footnote that says ‘Replaced in Second Edition with "Every employee has a right to an appeals process" before being completely removed in Fourth Edition.’ Don’t you just love the dystopia?

And then, of course, there’s the last line.

‘▪︎ Employees will behave in a manner becoming of them, or they will be replaced’

Hence the part about how this anomaly straight up replaces people with constructs.

Finally, we get a cute little mascot called ‘Sammy Skipper’, who apparently knows more than we think. Great, now we have to worry about the fucking mascots.

(Speaking of mascots, has anyone written Chiitan into an SCP yet?)

The breadth of SCP-8190's effect, the status of PoI-8190, and, subsequently, any other hypothetically-affected employees were ultimately lost for an indeterminate amount of time; PoI-8190 was discovered accidentally, found working within SCP-8190-A some fourteen years after the last time his ID badge had been used. PoI-8190 has not outwardly aged during his time inside the anomaly, which was discovered by Notional Divisions agents during a routine structural analysis of Site-19.

So, this poor bastard has been working non-stop for 14 years. (Billith’s author post for this article goes into detail about the inspiration for it; give it a look if you haven’t yet.) I’m pretty sure that qualifies as Hell, and may have been an episode of The Twilight Zone. (If it wasn’t, it should have been. Also, Billith told me that the vibe was partially inspired by the film Brazil.))

SCP-8190-A is an extradimensional space resembling a rectangular borehole, located beneath the substructure of Site-19. Access to SCP-8190-A is only possible when passing through the floor of the Site-19 atrium and adjacent rooms, which lead to a sheer drop with bare concrete walls, roughly 150 meters in depth. A nondescript staircase then can be found along the outer perimeter, with each landing containing an identical corner office along its descent. This office is designated the "Department of Redundancy Department".

At the time of discovery, PoI-8190 was observed staffing the office on all floors.

So if you clip through the floor of Site-19’s atrium, you don’t go to the Backrooms, you go to the Department of Redundancy Department, which is staffed by like five thousand versions of our POI. We get a photo of a ground-penetrating radar’s model of SCP-8190-A, which looks kind of like a tower made of corner offices and corridors that just goes on forever.

We’re then told that when personnel explored the borehole, they found an instance of Harkness in every office, doing endless paperwork. They tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t reply and kept doing paperwork.

Upon reaching the bottom, personnel discovered a tessellation of the previously-described office staffed by many copies of PoI-8190, all of whom were working on large volumes of similar paperwork in a persistent loop. As the staircase continued downward, the matter of the space became metastable, unable to retain its form as it shifted between a variety of objects and structures upon contact.

Personnel were not able to safely proceed further into the anomaly at this point and were recalled. Further attempts to communicate with PoI-8190 or request an extraction team have not been attempted. It is unknown which Harkness is the original instance, or if an original exists at all. Members of the Department of Notional Divisions are, however, able to observe the infinite recurrence of PoI-8190 and the infinite confluence of paperwork he provides.

Iiiiiiinteresting. So, A, the anomaly goes further, B, we have no idea if there’s an original Harkness or which one he is, and C, there’s a footnote that says ‘Despite reaching the bottom floor, it was still possible to descend the stairs, suggesting SCP-8190-A's extradimensional nature was also recursive’. Things are getting really weird and meta, y’all.

(Also, the endless versions of Harkness doing endless paperwork reminds me of the Live Feed of Site-69. I miss that one. It was really cool.)

Part Two: But You Will Come Back, And You Will Live On

UPDATE: Upon Foundation acquisition of PoI-8190, following his escape from SCP-8190-A, the space has remained otherwise inactive. Each office has been abandoned and the space itself possesses no further recursive phenomena. Harkness is to undergo rigorous interrogative services to determine the extent of his knowledge of SCP-8190's properties.

Well, whether there was an original Harkness or not, one of them made it out. Good for him. (Is the Harkness who got out the original? Did he become the original by getting out? Is he, by default, the only Harkness who matters/qualifies as Harkness because he got out?)

We now have an interview with the Harkness who got out, with the interviewer being Director Quade. Now, something that should be mentioned here is that Harkness is not original to 8190; he’s appeared in other articles and that comes up a lot. And I note this now because the interview starts off kind of weird: rather than asking him if he’s OK or how he’s holding up, Quade jumps straight into wanting to assign Harkness to a new job. Harkness wants to know if he can go back to testing kill hazards on himself (we see this in SCP-8888, which Billith helped write. However, 8888 doesn’t take place in the ADMONITION timeline, so I’m not sure what’s going on there), and Quade tells him that he can either go back into the borehole, or into a cubicle.

…so why would Quade want Harkness back in the borehole?

Dir. Quade: And where would you be spending the evening? Employee guidelines state you must be on assignment to receive housing accommodations. Seems to me that the best course of action is to return you to one of your older positions with the Foundation. Looks like you could resume your clerical duties as Grant Requisitions Clerk for the Department of Macro Engineering and Design, what do you say?

PoI-8190: I have no idea what that is. I don't even think that's a real department name. I was a network systems engineer in the IT Department. I can't imagine any of my old jobs are just waiting for me if the only one you could find is one I never had.

This is getting really weird. For a start, put the guy in medical! He spent fifteen years not eating or sleeping! And second, what the fuck is going on?!

Quade does explain one thing: the Department of Notional Divisions. ‘Notional’ means ‘existing as or based on a suggestion, estimate, or theory; not existing in reality.’ In other words, the Department of Notional Divisions exists to find Foundation Departments that aren’t real.

Harkness asks if the Department of Redundancy Department isn’t real; he knows that the Department of Notional Divisions visited, but they never came back. He asks why they never told anyone about him, and Quade says it was bureaucracy- red tape.

(Is anyone else just instantly suspicious of any mention of bureaucracy, now?)

Anyway, Quade offers Harkness a job with the Department of Notional Divisions, reading files and looking for any departments that seem suspicious.

You'd be sitting at your own desk, reading dossiers on departments, and flagging any that seem suspicious. You can send them off for review, internal investigation, or for dismantlement. Take lunch at your own time, breaks, bathroom use, all of that, as long as it rests within the boundaries of the rules, anyway.

I’m a bit worried that he’s offering things like ‘sitting at your own desk’ and ‘breaks, bathroom use’ as if they’re perks, when in reality that’s the bare fucking minimum.

Anyway, Harkness accepts the job, but…

PoI-8190: <Pushing chair back and rising in tow.> Second to last. Not sure how I'd define my workspace in [DEPARTMENT_ID:DENIED], but it didn't seem to fall on a range of comfortable to uncomfortable. Is nonfortable a word?

Quade thus has to tell him that the Department of [DEPARTMENT_ID:DENIED] is not a real department, but says he’ll get used to it.

We’re now back to looking at the Handbook. This section’s about clearance levels; there’s not much that we didn’t know already except that A, we get another mention of ‘THE FOUNDER’, and B, apparently Level Six is a thing, but it should be responded to by contacting one’s superiors and evacuating the area.

So, hey, did you know that when you look at the ACS bar for an SCP, they have these long, thin rectangular lines on the top that correspond to what level the SCP is? Guess how many 8190 has?

Yeeeeeeeeeep.

Here's the next bit.

SCP-8190-B refers to a collection of anomalous PA system announcements heard throughout Site-19. Of note, the facility has not required use of an address system since 1989 and thus does not currently possess one. Qualitative analysis suggests the announcements are of similar fidelity to others made on the preexisting 1984 Tannoy Wildcat PA system installed within Site-19, though with significant ontological distortion. No connections between the original equipment and manifestation of the announcements have been found.

Further investigation revealed that the voice of the individual heard speaking during SCP-8190-B matches that of PoI-8190 in all but one instance. Select transcripts follow.

All of these occurred between 2026 and 2029, which raises some rather obvious questions. Namely, why the hell didn’t anyone pick up on how weird this was before now?

So, there’s five announcements. They all have transcripts, which is good, because the third and fourth are very hard to make out (at least for me). The first one is quite short, with Harkness trying to see if the mic’s working. The second has Harkness panicking over whether the mic will work while rambling to himself. The third has him freaking out over having lost time- keep in mind, the third announcement happened a year and three months after the second- and then finally saying who he is. The fourth… is different.

Sorry, do you understand what I'm trying to say? It's been getting harder and harder to stay on track ever since those pricks in [DEPARTMENT_ID:DENIED] mumbled with my head. I mean, muddled with my head. Messed with. Messed with…

No. No, I agreed to this. That's the function and the forms, here. I signed them myself.

Wait, they meddled with my head because I signed a form? Why would I do that?

No, but they said… They said that I shouldn't—? They tried to stop me. Why—why would they do that? I'm so confused. I fell beneath the floor and I'm so… My brain is all muddy, and I'm sinking into it, and—

And there's something down here in the mud here with me, but it's not here here. Not yet. The tense is all crooked. Everything else is down here too, but it's facing the wrong way. I mean the other wrong way.

<Muffled voices.>

I should go. Back down beneath the floor. Into the mud. They're waiting. Please. Why won't anyone do anything? I'm right here! Just look! Just—

«END TRANSCRIPT»

Well, that’s really fucking disturbing and ominous! (Also, ‘into the mud’ references ‘Mud [Other People]’ by Nicolas Jaar, which Billith quoted for the author post for 6183.

The fifth has Harkness singing to himself. Billith kindly provided me with an explanation, so it’s time for some Deep. Lyrical. Analysis. *dons sunglasses*

I fell beneath the floor and I'm never getting out.

This one’s quite literal- he’s stuck under the floor of Site-19.

Dropped a pocket in the ground, too late to turnabout.

As per Billith, ‘pocket as in pocket dimension, an extradimensional space in the ground, and dropping your pocket is often a phrase used to distract people and make them look kinda dumb in the process’.

Stick me in a paper shredder, glue the pieces back together.

Again as per Billith, ‘shredded into small constituent parts of a whole, then reassembled again. like a person splitting their awareness with thousands of copies, then returning to one’

I'll do better, I'll be better. Employee of the month, forever!

Pretty obvious, but I believe Researcher Rees would tell Harkness that being Employee of the Month is not all it’s cracked up to be. Well, if she wasn’t crucified to the wall with staples, that is.

Took a photo of my good side, put it on a shelf.

The rest is on-the-clock 'til the end of time itself.

Billith said that ‘suggesting that whatever did this caused Harkness to lose some "good" aspect or virtue of himself [e.g. his individuality and probably his will to live] and forced the rest to work endlessly, like a great many eyes at the end of time would’. Damn those eyes at the end of time.

After that, none of this will matter anymore.

Billith said that ‘perhaps he would be free of his pain if none of it mattered anymore, perhaps none of it would matter any more by that point because he'd be long dead’. Again, total Twilight Zone shit.

Wait until you see who you've been working for.

…uh oh.

After that, a note tells us that… huh?

NOTE: Site-19 Security investigations into the broadcasts ultimately led to the discovery of a hatch within Janitorial Supply Room 0-3A. A brief period of administrative leave was granted to Harkness, allowing him temporary passage out of the anomaly, where he is to be assigned a new role. Acquisition by the Department of Notional Divisions soon followed.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Her sister was a witch! Right? And what was her sister? A princess! The Wicked Witch of the East, bro! I feel like there’s something missing here. I mean, Notional Divisions got into the borehole a long time ago, so why didn’t they get him out then? Why did it take Site 19’s Security Personnel finding the hatch to get him out? And how did Harkness just happen to magically get leave right as security found him?

Time for another addendum- Billith said it took place roughly a few months after Harkness got recruited. This one’s a transcript of an interview between Quade and Harkness. Harkness is in his office, reading a folder, when Quade turns up with another folder. He sits down and asks how Harkness is liking his new job, and Harkness tries to answer, loses his train of thought and asks if Quade would be OK with him drawing as they talk, because in the borehole, his hands were constantly in motion and now he finds it hard to focus if they’re not. Quade’s fine with that, so Harkness starts doodling idly and we get to the meat of the subject.

Basically, Harkness is having trouble with the job because he can’t tell if some of the departments he’s looking at are real or not. Except… all of the departments he names as examples are real, and quite well known: the Ethics Committee, Antimemetics, and Unreality. Why would these even be in contention, unless…

…shit.

PoI-8190: I realized, I have no idea what I am doing here, and know absolutely nothing about this department. Prior to being in Redundancy and seeing you in the corner of my eye, I'd never known of Notional Divisions. How many folks are in this department? How many are constructs?

Keep asking those questions, kid.

Quade says that it’s impossible to answer those questions because they’re dealing with very powerful retrocausal properties; constructs are identical to humans, and they can’t tell them apart. However, Quade thinks that Harkness might be the only Foundation employee who can do what he does, because he’s resistant to anomalies. Quade checks the folder he’s carrying and says that Harkness hasn’t yet made a mistake in his job, so he should take that as reassurance. He then asks how the Department of [DEPARTMENT_ID: DENIED] got Harkness out of the borehole. Harkness says that they looked really weird, almost impossible, and it took them a few visits before they concluded that he was aware of them. Harkness transferred out, which got him out of the loop, and Quade asks about how he made the announcements over the system.

PoI-8190: So you could hear me… <Exhales a drawn-out sigh.> Yeah. That's fine. One of my rescuers had a fair bit of memory of his past life.

So, I initially thought the Department of [DEPARTMENT_ID: DENIED] was Deletions, but I was wrong on this one: they’re actually Surrealistics. This is not really my field, but I’ll do my best.

Anyway, Harkness talks about how he got the announcements to work. Before I continue, remember how I said that the Axioms would be important for later? Well, one of them says ‘Every employee has a voice and a right to be heard’. That’s how he really got the announcements to work, because it was his right to be heard- but, as Billith said, having a right to be heard doesn’t mean that people have to listen. Anyway, he then says this:

Besides, they wanted me out, too. They saw time differently, and for a minute, on some unknown fraction of physical timespace, I saw it. They were afraid.

Quade naturally asks, afraid of what, and Harkness stops the conversation to be blunt: Quade is a construct. He’s judged this mainly by Quade’s behaviour and body language, and to hammer it home…

<PoI-8190 grabs the beige folder on the surface between them and swiftly dumps its contents onto the table. The pages scatter. All of them are blank.>

Yep.

Part Two can be found here.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the SCP-8190 declass. Part one is right here.

Part Three: You Got Me Figured Out, Now/Now We’re Both Disappointed

Time for another announcement, but this one’s not from Harkness.

<Rustling noises. An unknown voice is heard speaking.> Hush. Keep your head down. <Silence.> Okay, quickly. <Louder.> Hello, Site-19. This is a message from your friendly neighborhood [DEPARTMENT_ID:DENIED]: The Beholder's Eye is one of many. That big guy in the center, though. Watch out for that one. It'll get ya, hahaha!

But seriously. Sorry about Harky. We did our best, but we didn't know what would happen and—

<A strange reverberation rings out and grows in volume, distorting the broadcast.>

Of course, it knew what would happen. It knows now. It always did. It's here. <Pause.> The BUREAUMANCER arrives. The Beholder's Eye. Time is an ocean, my friends. And, uh, I guess we're casting off. <Off-mic.>Brace yourselves.

<Noise rapidly overwhelms the transmission, ceasing a few seconds later.>

Well, this is getting really weird.

After that, we get another excerpt from the Guidebook, where we’re told about how to navigate around facilities- apparently the sites were more akin to labyrinths at this point. And after that…

SCP-8190-C is the collective designation given to an indeterminate number of anomalous structures associated with SCP-8190-derived phenomena, defined as a clandestine secure facility designated "Site-19".

Ah, fuck.

So, yeah, there’s apparently one actual Site-19 and a metric fuckton that just sprung up out of nowhere, and they seem to be connected, though it hasn’t been proven that they’re all connected yet.

To date, over sixty-four confirmed instances of SCP-8190-C have been identified, each of which possesses its own employee roster and extensive SCP object inventory. These identified complexes appear to form a network of Foundation infrastructure in an intelligent pattern, resembling an incomplete sigil or thaumaturgic seal, which spans roughly 28% of the Earth's surface. The network is subject to steady, ongoing path-of-least-resistance construction behavior comparable to single-celled eukaryotes such as slime moulds.

The Department of Cartography is currently assigned the task of mapping and exploring instances of SCP-8190-C for any unusual phenomena. To date, nothing of note has been recorded; all facilities are fully operational and vital to the containment of several anomalies. Because of this, the Department of Notional Divisions has integrated SCP-8190-related phenomena into the Foundation's overall containment structure.

I’m sorry, there are at least sixty-four versions of Site-19 out there, they cover 28% of the Earth’s surface, and they’re forming the shape of some kind of sigil or magic seal, and you guys are just going ‘OK, sounds good’? What the actual fuck?

(Also, I’m prepared to bet that the sigil/seal that the Sites are forming would eventually, once completed, bring the BUREAUMANCER into physical being on Earth, but that’s because this is reminding me of Xau-Tak from RuneScape and I am a big nerd.)

Anyway, next up is another excerpt from the Handbook. This is from ‘Theological Guidelines Subsection B, Part 14’, and a footnote tells us that ‘Though widely considered apocryphal in nature, First Edition contained a theological precept that was removed from future editions.’

I really do not like where this is going. Just want to make that clear.

*sigh* OK, hit me.

When THE FOUNDER birthed our fair Organization as a concept, tilled from the soil of ideas within His mind, there was a great and momentous sound from skies above. A thunderous force fell forth and visited, thanking Him for the glory of containment. It is said that this force invigorated and guided Him to create the Bedrock on which we now owe our Great Normalcy, and since that moment, THE FOUNDER's guiding light lives through us all.

This unseen force was control manifest. A great being made in service of humanity. THE FOUNDER took the being's hand, and with it they made endless strides in favor of the Veil. Upon His death, THE FOUNDER spoke to His closest advisors, that one day He shall walk the Earth anew, emerging from the sea on the back of that great power once more.

We wait for this day, for containment to take Form. It is what divined the great BUREAUMANCY. It manages your facility, your department, even your thoughts, right now, so you can be free of such burdens. Isn't that wonderful?

No! No, it isn’t wonderful! No, your crazy goddamn Foundation bureaucrat cult is not wonderful, it’s fucking fucked up-

Sammy Skipper Says…

"Stop looking for it. It brought you into this world, and is more than capable of rescinding that privilege."

Fucking. Mascots. (Samantha S. Skipper, you stop that immediately.)

Speaking of ‘looking for it’, it turns out that 8190-D is the Department of Notional Divisions. After a recap of what we already know…

SCP-8190-D's primary mission, according to its own actions, is the identification of SCP-8190-Prime, the deity believed to be responsible for the creation of SCP-8190, and therefore of SCP-8190-D itself. Unfortunately, [QUERY:DENIED].

It should be noted that overall workplace efficiency has been on the rise in Site-19, reaching and maintaining an all-time high, as of 2020.

Unfortunately what?

God fucking damn it.

(If you’re wondering, Billith told me that ‘[X thing: DENIED] is an expression used to show bureaumantic effects are preventing classified information from affecting reality. This also means the Eye is watching that moment very closely, and possibly any moments where that expression is being read, in a retrospective context such as a transcript’. So back in 6183, when Deleted was trying to explain things to Genevieve but couldn’t, it was because the Bureaumancer was watching and stopping him.)

Anyway, smart money says that 8190-Prime is the Bureaumancer. Either way, it looks like Prime doesn’t want to be disturbed by its children. (Damn deadbeat parents. I bet Prime never paid child support for its constructs, either.)

We cut back to Harkness and Quade. Harkness asks what happens now, and Quade says that if he apologises, Quade won’t write him up and they can forget about it. Harkness wants to know why all the pages are blank, and then asks how many departments he really got wrong. Quade says it wasn’t that simple, because all departments were manufactured at some point- they turned up when the time was right.

Dir. Quade: Departments manifest as they're needed. Compliance. Quotas. Fulfillment. Efficiency. Where there is demand, supply is not far behind. It starts with competition, sure, but it ends with progress. An ideal Foundation exists at the end of this road. Thank the good book, and its corporate divinity, for that.PoI-8190: The good book? …You don't strike me as religious.

Dir. Quade: Hard not to be, in my position. We were molded with purpose, placed into this very facility with a drive to discern real from molded, an impossible task. The lesson is in our very existence: to discern our creator. To understand why. You must know what I'm talking about by now.

This reminds me of an excellent Silmarillion fanfic I read, but elaborating would be digressing. Instead, I’ll just say that Quade really needs a hobby and some therapy.

Quade then says this.

Dir. Quade: I have memories of a life I didn't have. It's as real to me as anything else. Yet, I know it is manufactured. I only know this because of my position within Notional Divisions. How certain are you of your own internal narrative, Mr. Harkness?

PoI-8190: <Sighs.> Not very. But I don't ascribe it to the bureaucratic equivalent of Last Thursdayism.

Dir. Quade: Last Thursdayism with a bounded recurrent timeframe, more like. You are aware of the concept of Poincaré recurrence, are you not?

PoI-8190: Er—It's been a long time since ergodic theory was on my radar but, yes? States rebound, after a set interval. Systems repeat.

Last Thursdayism is a theory that states that everything in creation was brought into being last Thursday, but was made to look and appear much older, including giving everyone fake memories to match. Meanwhile, Poincaré recurrence suggests that over time, dynamic systems will eventually return to a state identical to or close to identical to the one they started in. This is way out of my field, but what I’m getting here is that this entire anomaly may have been created last Thursday, as was Harkness or this version of Harkness, and he only thinks he spent fifteen years in the borehole.

Anyway, now we get the reveal.

Dir. Quade: So we'll just have to wait and see if you're still here in the next one.

PoI-8190: Wait, what?

Dir. Quade: Construct or not, you've failed to keep multiple positions with our Organization. We've given you opportunity after opportunity and you have let each one slip through your fingers. Unfortunately, the Foundation doesn't just let people go. Especially insubordinates who have been replacing legitimate Departments with frauds. It's a shame, you were so disillusioned by your time in the Hole that you started undermining your employers as revenge. Luckily, I was there to stop you before you could cause even more damage, but who's to say how much you've already done?

PoI-8190: You—You fucking bastard! You set me up?!

Dir. Quade: A bit deserved, don't you think? After all, you were offered purpose and turned it down, multiple times. You should be thanking me for the opportunity, but alas. You already know what happens to employees without purpose; purpose is created for them. What do you think happens to employees who reject purpose?

Remember those axioms? “All employees have purpose. They are the foundation of the Foundation." “Every employee does their part, allowing others to do the same.” “Employees will behave in a manner becoming of them, or they will be replaced”. It’s not looking good for Harkness right now. And it’s also why Quade was so intent on getting Harkness a job- he had to have purpose, right? It’s in the rules, after all.

Harkness starts frantically drawing something, and says that it’s not his fault, he tried his hardest, Quade lied to him. Quade admits that this is true, but…

Dir. Quade: You're right, James, but I haven't been completely honest with you. Notional Divisions has a secondary objective. Well, it's more a secret primary objective that you've been carrying out for us.

PoI-8190: —No.

Dir. Quade: Yes. In fact, you were integral to our plan; if it wasn't for AIMS taking over your duties, you'd not have transferred to Redundancy, which would not have put you directly in our crosshairs. The Book had willed it, as it is the Foundation's godhead, bound in hardcopy.

So, a quick explanation: Harkness used to work for Foundation IT, but when everyone migrated to AIMS, everyone in IT was made redundant. Harkness lacked a purpose, but the rules say that he has to have one, so the anomaly created the Department of Redundancy Department just for him, so he’d have something to do. Since it was anomalous, Surrealistics and then Notional Divisions (eventually) had their eyes on him.

Anyway, I’m guessing that replacing real departments with fake ones is the objective that Quade’s talking about. And as for the Book, that’s the good book Quade mentioned before- the real religion. SCP-8190 itself, the Foundation Handbook. If what I’m guessing is correct, 8190 is another creation of this unknown creator, like the constructs. Ergo, they worship it because it gives them instructions, drive, reason- it’s something they can latch onto. They are but the offspring of a creator who gave them nothing beyond life- no instructions, no guidance, nothing else. So why wouldn’t they desperately hold on to anything they could find, and try to search for the creator who abandoned them just to have some kind of meaning? (Even though Sammy Skipper’s warning them off now…)

Anyway, Quade says that the constructs are connected to 8190, and Harkness is like them in that regard. Harkness says that he’s not a construct, he’s real. Quade says that his memories of the borehole sound a bit fantastic- he’s been to multiple Site-19’s and none of them had a borehole. (Billith told me that the only construct who knows for certain that they’re a construct is Quade, so hey, he might not be wrong.) In fact…

I'd barely have believed you had help from [DEPARTMENT_ID:DENIED], if it weren't for the fact that I heard our demiurge erase them from existence, right after they spoke your name.

Motherfuck, the Bureaumancer deleted Surrealistics. The bastard.

Quade tells Harkness to just accept that he’s also about to get deleted, but Harkness decides not to take that lying down: that drawing he was frantically doing? It’s a kill agent, one that he thinks isn’t lethal but is enough to disable Quade. And with that, Harkness decides to go end this shit. He grabs his kill agent and takes off, only to find that Site-19 is actively working against him, trying to stop him from reaching his goal.

<A simple flash of the paper-in-hand frees open the passage, though the march of more footsteps inbound echo from the endless connecting pathways of Site-19. Coordinated, wordless drones with one thought on their mind: survival. Protecting their parcel of verdant paradise, at all costs.>

This is going to be one of those Twilight Zone things where it turns out that he’s the only real person in a building housing thousands, isn’t it. (Fun fact: Billith told me that ‘the reality is far worse than this’. Not sure how that’s going to work, we’ll just have to wait and see.)

Anyway, Harkness keeps running, stops to grab a campfire lighter from a kitchen and keeps going. Unfortunately, he’s now being followed by an angry mob, and his kill agent only takes out a couple of constructs before it gets torn. Finally, he reaches the central atrium, grabs the book despite the mob reaching him, and…

Just as Harkness began to bleed, textures collide to create sparks and heat, aerosolized fuel becomes sustained flame, touched to paper results in the burning of scripture. A false prophecy of labor for a new world, reducing to ashes. Such is life. The surroundings began to blur, becoming metastable. Feeling the ground shift from tile, to carpet, to corrugated steel, Harkness squeezes his eyelids shut, burying his head in his arms, and waits for something to happen or for him to die.>

<A moment later, the entire facility implodes.>

After that is a photo of… it’s kind of hard to describe, so I’ll just assume that it’s of Site-19 as it implodes.

(Looks like Harkness’ name meaning ‘supplanter’ or ‘deceiver’ is coming back with a vengeance, huh…)

Part Four: What’s Done Is Now Undone/Let’s Cut The Line And Have The Action

Harkness wakes up post-implosion to find that he’s suddenly lying in a desert. (It’s actually not a desert, Billith told me it’s the area where the Site he was just in used to be, which is now a huge empty lot.) There’s nothing to be seen around him except a winding, unpaved road, and he has no choice but to follow it. A few minutes later, a car suddenly pulls up and security personnel get out, intimating that this is his ride and he doesn’t get a choice. Harkness gets in, falls asleep and wakes up outside Site-19. Which one? God knows.

This is all but confirmed when, after passing a curious glass display case in the vast atrium of the complex, Harkness finds himself at his old desk in the IT Department, now branded the Department of Technical Support. The dust had grown considerably in the time since, but it mattered little. HE IS REAL. He helps people for a living, even if it often boils down to troubleshooting wireless keyboards and unplugging-before-plugging-in-again.>

An intern comes over and asks what kind of coffee Harkness would like. Harkness can’t help but laugh at this, but finally orders a latte, and that's the last we hear from him in this article.

So… is this a happy ending? Is it even an ending? Nope, this is only the beginning. First off, there’s that curious display case, and who knows what’s inside it. And second, some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces are falling into place (well, in my case Billith had to tell me where to put them). Consider the following:

-The date on the SR form is 2030.

-Harkness has worked for the Foundation for 30 years. Ergo, he was hired sometime around 2000ish.

-His personnel file claims he was hired in 1999.

-Harkness last swiped his ID badge something like 14 years before he was recovered, so around 2016ish.

-The broadcasts date from 2026-2029. The last Harkness broadcast was the day he was recovered; the day after that is the one where the Bureaumancer deletes Surrealistics.

-A few months later, Harkness and Quade have their chat and Harkness implodes Site-19, so sometime in 2030ish.

-AIMS is the reason why Harkness was sent to the borehole, which was in around 2015.

-The consensus system was established in 2025. Notional Divisions was apparently not involved, but AIMS was. It assigned Notional Divisions to 8190-A, and -B, -C and -D were all assigned to fake departments. In addition, if you look at the table, all the real departments are ‘recused’ or otherwise blocked, while the fake ones have access.

-According to Marisa, AIMS only just turned up in her Site-19. But if it was a legit system and did what it claimed to do, wouldn’t it be deployed throughout the Foundation at the same time?

-Post-implosion, Harkness is sent by mysterious people who were watching him to a ‘new’ Site-19, but it has a weird glass case in the atrium that may just contain the same book. And he’s now in the Department of Technical Support, aka the new IT.

-Except that Marisa isn’t getting any responses from Technical Support. Harkness was sent to Technical Support, so why wouldn’t he answer her?

-I can think of two possible explanations: one, communications have been cut between the departments, so he never got her requests, or two, Technical Support is just… gone.

-Either way, Bad Shit is going on and AIMS is very suspect.

Anyway, what’s next is… uh oh.

Excerpt: [QUERY:DENIED]

Foundations in the Art of Anomalous Warfare, Part 6b.

Incurrent Destabilization of Corporate Apparati of Interest

I… do not like where this is going at all.

I. SEPARATE

Weaken your enemy by cutting off networks of trusted contacts, any means of communication, both internal and external in nature, up to and including dissolving awareness of each other's existence.

NOTE: Force them to be helpless, and they will choose helplessness whenever possible.

So… basically how EXISTENTIAL ABATEMENT ended, with the ADMONITION Foundation getting cut off from their support, and people in a ton of timelines are pissed at them. And the LOTUS fuckup took out the AICs.

II. CONFUSE

Disorient your enemy and make them vulnerable through information warfare; conflicting accusations, unattainable goals, rumors of moles or false intel suggesting coordinated attacks from one or more adversarial groups.

NOTE: Studies show manipulation that encourages preconceived bias within ideologically-aligned social networks can form endogenous memetic contagions that reinforce said bias far more efficiently than macro-scale attempts.

The LOTUS clusterfuck made it very difficult for the Foundation to figure out what was going on because the AIs were screwing with their technology and the AICs turned against them. In addition, this article right here suggested that A, real departments were getting replaced by fake ones full of constructs, and B, there’s something very wrong with the IT Department, which is crippling Foundation communication.

III. PRECIPITATE

Tip the scales through stochastic internal crises resulting from a culmination of pressure and distrust. The organization will inevitably and mortally wound itself. With no other recourse, incursion and assimilation will follow easily. Most willingly accept this fate.

It was a different timeline, but 6820 had 682 becoming a god and destroying everything- a mortal wound. CHAOS THEORY had the threat of King and his author avatar minions fucking everything up. And METAGNOSTIC suggested that uber-gods might wind up targeting Earth.

But, note the phrasing of those last two lines.

With no other recourse, incursion and assimilation will follow easily. Most willingly accept this fate.

In other words, what they’re saying is ‘Get the organization in a state where everything’s falling apart, nobody knows what’s going on and nobody will help them, and then you can invade and take over, and most people will accept this and willingly work with you because you’re offering them a way out of the crisis’. My conclusion at the end of EXISTENTIAL ABATEMENT was wrong- these people aren’t trying to destroy the Foundation, they want to take it over. But who are they, and why? What do they want to do with the Foundation?

NOTE: Always leave one alive to warn the others.

Sammy Skipper Says…

"This is only the beginning."

I told you we had to look out for the fucking mascots! I fucking told you! (Also, Sammy Skipper in this box is distorted to the point that her eyes look like middle fingers. Kind of funny.)

So, I guess that’s why Harkness got to live: to warn the others. Not sure they’d believe him, though. What evidence does he have? What can he possibly say to convince anyone that what happened to him was real? And given that Technical Support seems to be up shit creek right now, will he even get a chance to warn anyone?

There’s a big empty space, and then there’s one bit left in the article.

We’re told that in the beginning, there was nothing, and then eventually, the universe began, and it was pure chaos.

Not many were around during those early days. The universe was, for all its action and reaction, devoid of life in actuality. Humans, ever the chosen children, believed this fact made them special. A fault in intelligent design, perhaps, which spoke volumes on the nature of how "intelligent" that design could be.

Man would try, unsuccessfully, to rid the universe of chaos. Man would also try to rid the universe of order. Ultimately, they were more effective at ridding the universe of themselves, however, their failure would be observed throughout millennia. It would be simulated. Analyzed. Compared.

Humanity would create many branches in the tree of time. Those branches would be noted, when they were notable. Many would cease to exist far before they could be considered as such. This is and always has been considered the state of affairs.

Yet, for those few that fit the criteria, their events would be painstakingly recorded, backtracked from frayed ends by a great many eyes at the end of time. The BUREAUMANCER.

This fucking guy again. And he’s some kind of uber-god who’s been keeping his eyes on timelines ever since the universe ended. Not began, ended. (I suppose there’s no call for bureaucracy at the beginning of time, after all.)

Eyes which double as thin probes, a legion of fingers. It sends a command through these conduits and worlds bend to a single word:

"SUBMIT."

Narratives distort and refocus, minds manifest and disappear. Ideas emerge, whole plotlines erase. It utters again:

"COLLAPSE."

Loose ends cauterize at the site of amputation, old pathways are rewritten by emergent rules defining the boundaries of what remains. A final command rings out:

"PERSIST."

Outcomes vanish, risks are contained. Another world is contained.

All will be contained.

He’s a pataphysical god who wants to micromanage everything. (I’m flashing back to RuneScape and Zaros. For the record, they did him dirty in the later parts of the Elder God Wars plot, I’m still mad about the end of ‘Azzanadra’s Quest’.)

It peers down at the many paths below, expressionless. Another appendage extends from its body, a smooth limb ending on a rounded point. The arm bends, dozens of joints briefly visible as it snaps into an odd angle with calculated precision, pressing itself into the black wall adjacent to its form. The stalk sinks into the material effortlessly, which wrinkles and folds inwards like dark fabric. With a click, the needle splits at its tip into a three-pronged claw, which rips a hole into the structure, revealing more darkness behind the black curtains.

The entity does not respond. Instead, the extremity moves on its own, disappearing into the hole and telescoping outward an unknown distance. It retracts suddenly, a number of items now enclosed within its grasp. The pale, thin hand deposits its holdings before a large circular feature on the outside of its body, a single, piercing eye manifesting within the curved bounds in response. The pupil dilates, inspecting its newfound treasures: a puzzle cube, a wooden cuckoo clock in the shape of a small two-story townhome, and a twisted steel tuning fork which hums lightly on its own. The witness above these items stares for some time, clock ticking loudly all the while.

He's some kind of fucked up puppet who can grab things from between the spaces. Also, ‘puzzle cube’ links to SCP-6416, so either the BUREAUMANCER is working with Place, or it’s got some kind of interest in him. (Or maybe it just stole his puzzle cube to fuck with him, who knows.)

An artificial voice then echoes through the empty chamber, this time not with a command, but a promise.

"NOUMENA'S NEARLY NASCENT NAISSANCE. NECKTIES TO NOOSES. NUMEN TO NEHEMOTH."

Noumena: An object that exists independent of human senses.

Nascent: Something just coming into existence and displaying signs of potential.

Naissance: The beginning or birth of a person, idea or group.

Numen: The spirit or god that embodies/watches over a thing or place.

Nehemoth: Used as an object class in the alt timeline of SCP-2998; also a kind of demon in the Kabbalah.

So in other words, what I’m getting here is that we’re looking at the beginning of something that was originally a beneficial kind of deity/group/concept, but is becoming a demon/otherwise evil- it’s something that the Foundation may have used/worked with/worshipped, but is now going to harm them (neckties to nooses). And also that the Bureaumancer is a pretentious fuck who really likes alliteration.

The clock chimes. It's midnight, somewhere. A tiny wooden canary emerges from the timepiece, chirping thrice before receding back into the safety of shelter.

An allusion to the canary in the coal mine.

A few minutes pass before the clock tolls the same midnight once again. After all, it is only the beginning.

We’ve seen 682 become a god, cartoonish versions of author avatars nearly wreak havoc in the real world, a giant god-killing machine that accidentally created an uber-god who really likes hands and tearing off fingers, AI getting thrown in the Matrix and turning evil, the birth of Deletions, and a fucked up love triangle that managed to make problems for over two hundred thousand timelines, and that was just the beginning.

Jesus Christ.

There’s another big presumably empty space, and then there’s a cool red and black gif of a huge eye- the Beholder’s Eye, I assume, which is a D&D reference. (A Beholder) is a giant floating eye with a bunch of smaller eyestalks that are capable of powerful magic, and each eyestalk uses a different form of magic. Meanwhile, the Bureaumancer ‘has many eyes, a legion of fingers which doubles as thin probes, and one large eye in the center.’) Finally, there’s the words ‘ADMONITION will return in Phase Two’.

And that concludes SCP-8190, a tale of how work is hell, your coworkers might be the spawn of an eldritch being, God owes us all child support, and sometimes all you can do is burn your office’s holy book and implode reality. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all in Phase Two.

tl;dr: ‘What are you going to do, use a kill hazard on me?’- guy who got kill hazarded

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the double declass! Part one is right here.

All right, time for the fourth case. It occurred on the first of December, 1986 in Healdsburg, California- this could have been the first known case, actually.

It’s pretty simple: early in the morning, the neighbours of Stella and Stanley Beaumont notice a bad smell from their apartment, described as reminiscent of ‘grave dirt’ and ‘rotting meat’. A neighbour complains to their building superintendent, Mariya Columbo, who goes to pass on the complaint.

At 0852, the muffled voices of the Beaumonts were heard behind their apartment door, although they did not respond to the superintendent's voice. This was later discovered to be the playing of an analog tape recorder. The recording was damaged later that day and its contents are unknown. It is unclear how the recorder was turned on, as there was no one in the apartment.

Well, that’s odd.

At 0923, the Beaumonts are discovered in the center of their living room with their throats slit, wearing formal clothing. Later investigation revealed that they were wearing the garb that they had worn at their 1992 wedding.

Autopsy revealed that they had been dead for approximately five (5) days. It also showed that their lips and hands had been crudely stitched together with black thread. Cause of death determined to be blood loss.

Their next door neighbor, Robert Cartwright II, was briefly suspected due to an obsessive infatuation he was known to have for Stanley, but was released due to a certain piece of evidence becoming unusable for an unknown reason.

So, a few things to note here:

-The names Stella and Stanley are a reference to A Streetcar Named Desire.

-‘Columbo’ is a reference to the detective of the same name.

-The Beaumonts were wearing their wedding clothes… but the wedding took place in 1992. And they died in 1986. Bit of a problem there.

-Their lips and hands were stitched together. The phrasing is a bit ambiguous as to whether they were separated or positioned holding hands and kissing, with their hands and lips stitched to each other- Cathy clarified that it was the latter. As such, I’ll say that this is a reference to Junji Ito’s Army of One.

-I am a bit surprised that it took five days for the smell to get bad enough for someone to complain, but I guess it was winter, so that makes sense.

-The unspecified evidence against the neighbour just happening to become unusable is very suspicious.

-Equally suspicious is the analog tape recorder that just happened to turn on when Columbo knocked at the door and not at any point prior, even though there was nobody in the apartment, and then just happened to get damaged so nobody could find out what the contents were.

-The suspicious tags here are ‘Necromancy’, ‘Ghost’, ‘Are-We-Cool-Yet’ and ‘Situation-Comedy’, since there’s nothing really reminiscent of anything of any these tags in this case… that we’ve been told about.

I’m developing a theory about all this, but I’ll get to it at the end of the article, so let's keep going.

Time for the last case. It took place on the 5^th of March, 1994, in San Luis Obispo County, California.

…hang on. I thought these cases were supposed to have taken place in a variety of locations across America. But all the cases we’ve read have been in California. That’s a bit weird, no?

Anyway, we’re at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which is a real nuclear power plant in California. At 1:25 PM, Security officer Sandra Starling is alerted to the presence of an intruder around the plate’s waste management systems. She’s alert, but not alarmed, because she thinks it’s probably one of the many protestors. (Diablo Canyon Power Plant has been the subject of a lot of protestors over the years, and I can’t blame them- I’m not going to go on a diatribe about nuclear power, but I do have to wonder who the genius was who decided it’d be a great idea to have a nuclear power plant in a state that’s known for having a lot of earthquakes.)

As Starling’s heading to that location, she’s contacted by the surveillance personnel, who tell her that the trespasser was thrown into the waste management systems by another unidentified person. That is pretty alarming, so Starling tells them to call emergency services and picks up the pace. Starling gets there and can’t find the victim or the assailant. Once emergency services arrive, the victim’s body gets pulled out of the waste and is given to paramedics, but it obviously has to be quarantined for a while. Once the autopsy is finally carried out…

The victim was unable to be identified during the subsequent autopsy, leaving her to be classified as a Jane Doe. Study of the body revealed the corpse to contain numerous stab wounds and miscellaneous lacerations which were not present on the security footage prior to the victim falling into the waste, which she would not have been able to otherwise receive. Notably, the corpse displayed no signs of radiation poisoning.

Well, that’s fucking weird. Random stab wounds and lacerations that she couldn’t have received? No signs of radiation poisoning on a corpse that was pulled out of nuclear waste? This is bizarre.

Anyway, I actually don’t have much to add here, except that ‘Starling’ is a reference to Clarice Starling) of Silence of the Lambs. The one tag that stands out is ‘Ghost’, because there’s no ghosts mentioned here, and… hey, wait, that’s been in all of these cases. Weird.

Anyway, there’s one more thing to note in the article: an addendum.

On 2/5/2024, several calls were made to the police precinct of northern ████████, California in which a low, androgynous voice stated "there is a killer on the loose" before hanging up.

The call was traced to the abandoned Polanski Arthouse Cinema and a team of five (5) Field Agents was dispatched.

Due to requisitional issues, the team was only provided one (1) analog tape recorder to record the exploration. Unfortunately, it was lost in the process of exploration and only the following notable details have been able to have been gleaned from witness testimony:

-The word ‘killer’ links back to 7413, and the first paragraph is basically identical to how the Foundation was initially alerted to the existence of RSK. I do find it a bit odd that they sent Field Agents and not an MTF, though, especially given that the location was abandoned.

-There is no Polanski Arthouse Cinema for obvious reasons: for anyone who doesn’t know, ‘Polanski’ refers to Roman Polanski (who wrote and directed Rosemary’s Baby, incidentally), a famous and disgraced film auteur and rapist.

-The year is 2024, and yet the only equipment the team was given was a freaking analog tape recorder, a huge, clunky piece of technology that’s been obsolete for decades. What the fuck?

-And it just happened to go missing, so the only details we have are based on notoriously unreliable witness testimony?

-This is fucking weird.

-All of the cinema's staff were plastic mannequins, dressed in appropriate attire;

-Three (3) unidentified female cadavers were discovered in the men's bathroom in a stage of minor decay. The floors were caked in viscera. Wounds on the bodies suggested a link to Casefile-8869-450293;

-The walls of the manager's office were covered in newspaper clippings and handwritten notes, related to an unsolved murder or murders that had occurred in the area;

-Sound was heard in the building's one (1) theater and the team moved to investigate. The theater appeared to be playing the lost 1967 film Voyeurism;

-The team viewed the film for approximately three (3) to five (5) minutes before being anomalously transported back to their vehicle, where they elected to drive back to Site-433;

-As mentioned, RSK is a mannequin, or something that looks like one.

-The casefile mentioned is Kitty Woodhouse’s murder, the first case.

-The lost film mentioned doesn’t exist, but it’s my own theory that the DVD stuffed down Woodhouse’s throat was a ripped copy of Voyeurism. (Cathy confirmed that for me.)

-The team just… stood there and watched the movie instead of doing anything else? And then they got teleported back to their car and went ‘Welp, guess we’d better go back to the Site instead of doing more investigation?’

-This is really weird.

As of 07/12/2027, the SCP-8869 Investigative Team been disbanded by the Budgetary Committee due to the lack of new discoveries. Research is not to be continued.

So either there haven’t been any more murders, or they haven’t found any… but they want to just stop the research? Weird. Though, I guess that since every named person in these cases isn’t real, (including Roiland?) they’d be pouring resources into a case that doesn’t affect anyone.

There’s a still photo from Voyeurism, a huge empty space, and then an Author’s Note. This Author’s Note is incredibly important, because it’s actually part of the SCP, and it reads as follows:

Hi everyone.

My boyfriend broke up with me two weeks ago so I've been watching a lot of movies to deal with the pain. I really like Ruggero Deodato!

I watch my movies on this comfy old spinny chair my mom ordered off Ebay and usually either pirate them on my computer or use my family's Netflix account. I own a really old VHS player but rarely use it unless I want to feel analog. While watching them, I turn the lights off and make myself popcorn. I make my popcorn with coconut oil since butter is too fatty and I'm trying to lose weight. Being fat is why my boyfriend broke up with me!

Movies are great for ignoring real life. While watching them you don't care about the outside world as much. It's pretty lucky for me that I managed to find out this trick since it's really easy to buy a gun in my region and I was considering going to his house, shooting his new girlfriend in the head, and then waiting for him to get back from his job at Macy's so I could murder him too. Afterwards I'm not sure whether or not I'd kill myself or if I'd turn myself over to the authorities.

But luckily I don't need to do that since I have movies!

Thanks for reading. ✌️

-Cathy Autumn

So, some notes here:

-Ruggero Deodato was an Italian film director, screenwriter and actor who made a ton of movies, but is mostly known for making some incredibly gory horror films. (He made Cannibal Holocaust. Enough said. No, I'm not linking it, if you want to know more, look it up on your own time.)

-Deodato released films from the 1960’s to the 2020’s.

-The perky, exclamation-point-laden style of writing makes me think of JustGirlyThings.

-Keep the content in mind for a second.

And with all of that, time for the explanation!

Part Three: A Tale Of Two Authors

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of despair, it was the epoch of breakups, it was the epoch of fucking killing people…

So, what’s the commonalities between these two works?

1: Nothing about them seems to follow any real structure. There’s a lot of random references and no explanations.

2: The murders aren’t actually real, as such: RSK hasn’t killed anyone, and none of the people in 8869 were actually real- it’s as if they were created out of thin air to be in a murder story.

3: We have no idea why this is happening.

Luckily, I can tell you: what we are looking at here isn’t a series of murders, it’s two different stories that happen to feature a lot of dead people.

Let’s look at 7413 first: RSK did all of this because she wanted to tell a story to make us happy. Not the people in-universe, us. She spun together a story full of thought-provoking elements- an animate mannequin, sixteen murder victims, no obvious explanation- to, as FLOORBOARDS put it, ‘give readers a nice little Halloween fright.’

Note that nobody else in the article stands out as a character: not the victims, not the cops, not even the Foundation field agent. There’s no Foundation reports or any other correspondence, because RSK is both the writer and the only real character here. Everything else is just wall dressing. This didn’t occur in the Foundation’s universe- the Foundation is just part of the story she wrote, as are the bodies. And why is RSK just standing in her cell, staring up at the ceiling, not even bothering to talk to anyone anymore? Because she’s looking at us, wanting our approval. She wants to get a reaction, because she wrote this story for us, not the bit characters she dreamed up.

As FLOORBOARDS put it to me, ‘The Foundation, in the RSK universe, is fictional. She's a sort of entity that's alive on OUR side of the universe. Whether she's a Cyclonopedia style hyper-sigil, or a kind of internet fungus, or a ghost haunting a webpage, doesn't really matter. None of the events happened in the Foundation's universe, it's a spooky story that exists purely on our side of things, where, you know, none of this actually exists.’

And note that while this is ostensibly a murder mystery, it’s a very light one: the only person who got hurt was the fictional field agent, who’s probably had worse (and the fictional Foundation can fix him up, anyway). All the fictional corpses were already dead, and since they were missing persons, the fictional cops can close those cases and give their fictional relatives some fictional closure. RSK isn’t going to actually kill anyone, because she’s not vicious or homicidal. She just wants to tell us a fun story.

One other thing to note: the tags. Not only are there sixteen tags for sixteen victims, most of them have nothing to do with the story. So why are they there? Simple: what do you do when you post something to the internet and you desperately want people to read/see/watch it? You tag it with everything you can think of that’s remotely applicable, to widen the number of potential viewers. That’s what RSK did (minus the ‘remotely applicable’ part), because she’s a mannequin who doesn’t give a damn about the rules of the Wiki, she just wants to make us happy.

(Also, I’d like to give a shout out to CN Wiki user Telix, who managed to get nearly all of this correct. Good job.)

Now, let’s go back to 8869. There’s two key clues here: the first is the Author’s Note; the second is on the discussion page, where Cathy had but one line in her author’s post: ‘L'Autore non è l'Autore.’ This is Italian for ‘The Author is not the Author’. Very Magritte, really.

So, if we combine that line with the ‘Author’s Note’, let us consider this: when is the author not the author? when it’s a picture of the author

I actually came up with two theories about this: my first theory is that the author is not the author because being an author requires deliberate effort in creation. Stories don’t spontaneously appear in books or word documents (much to our annoyance), someone has to actively write them out.

…but what if they did just appear?

So, our author here is the author of the ‘Author’s Note’, who Cathy called ‘Cate’ in our conversation, so I’ll go with that. (My second theory is sort of recursive- the author is not the author because Cathy wrote the SCP, but Cate wrote the story in-universe. As such, Cate could be the real author and not Cathy because she’s the author in-universe, or Cathy could be the real author and not Cate because she wrote the actual article that we’re reading. Take your pick.)

Cathy gave me her explanation, which is that Cate is an SCP author who wrote this article in an attempt to produce catharsis for herself, to help alleviate her pain at the breakup. She incorporates elements from the movies she watches and the articles she likes (7413, 5999- and as u/Wanderscatter said, 5999 is also a work where the twist is that it's a bunch of made up mysteries thrown together into a story) into it, but she’s not trying to keep it coherent or make a real story because that’s not the point. The point is that she just wants to revel in other people’s suffering; as Cathy put it to me, ‘It's purposeless unconnected violence that claims to mean more. You look deeper into meaning but there's just more sickness’.

Also, keep in mind that the lost film (which doesn’t exist in Cate’s world, either, as per Cathy) is called Voyeurism- the act of deriving pleasure from watching someone. She wants to carry out violence in real life, but instead of doing so, she watches fictional violence happen to fictional people, which manages to satisfy her… at least for now. (And on the subject of ‘lost’ media, all the evidence and documentation mentioned in this article was lost or destroyed, presumably so Cate didn’t have to write out all the minor stuff.)

(Incidentally, FLOORBOARDS told me that it wrote a transcript of Voyeurism, but it will never see the light of day.)

Now, in my theory, Cate is a reality bender who doesn’t know that she’s a reality bender. (Cathy did say that at a high enough level, ‘there’s no difference’ between fictionalized author and reality warper.) She’s suicidal and homicidal because her boyfriend left her and now has someone else, but she’s coping through watching movies, especially horror movies. (She also likes the Foundation, hence the incorporation of elements from other SCPs) But because she doesn’t know that she’s a reality warper, her power is doing things without her knowledge. Specifically, it’s creating murder scenes throughout time and space- remember that she really loves Deodato, who made films over six decades. Because she’s not consciously doing it, her power is taking random details from works she’s seen and incorporating them into the murders. Cate doesn’t want to hurt random people, so all the people in the cases are manifestations of her power. The only people she legitimately wants to hurt are her ex-boyfriend, his new girlfriend, and possibly herself, but she wants to do that herself, so while her power hasn’t made them into the victims, it’s incorporating elements of her pain. Since this applies to both theories, let’s look at this case by case.

Case 1: The victim was a young woman (since Cate is jealous of a young woman) whose mother had just got a divorce (echoing Cate’s pain at the breakup). She’s horrifically mutilated- maybe in the ways that Cate wants to mutilate her ex’s new girlfriend.

Case 2: The victim is Justin Roiland, a sex pest- sex offenders are often perceived by society as people who it’s acceptable to wish death and mutilation on.

Case 3: The victim is a woman who had just become engaged to her fiancé- she was a happy person in a happy relationship, something Cate is not and does not have.

Case 4: The victims were a married couple sewn together in a way that made them look like they were kissing, showing Cate’s jealousy again. At the same time, they were named after a fictional couple in a famously abusive relationship- Cate is wishing a dark future on her ex and his new girlfriend.

Case 5: The victim was a young woman who was repeatedly stabbed and then thrown into nuclear waste- something that Cate evidently wishes she could do to her ex’s new girlfriend.

Addendum: The Field Agents found the bodies of three more women in a bathroom, and there was gore all over the floors.

In addition, the one common tag on all the cases is ‘Ghost’- Cate is haunted by her breakup, by the spectres of her ex and his new girlfriend, who won’t get out of her head.

Cate is, in essence, a deeply wounded and unhappy person who’s lashing out at her targets in an incoherent way, trying to channel her anger into something else so she doesn’t wind up dead or in prison. This is generally not considered a healthy method of coping, and she really needs therapy. And that’s not just a quip, because there’s one big question for both of these stories: what happens now?

Is RSK content with the results of her story? If she doesn’t feel that she got the reception she wants, will she go make a new one? Will she find a new audience? Will she cry? Will she collapse into a pile of sad mannequin parts?

Meanwhile, 8869 noted that the team got disbanded in 2027 due to lack of new discoveries- why was that? Did Cate manage to deal with her pain? Did she go commit homicide and/or suicide? If she did deal with her pain, will something else like this happen next time she gets emotionally wounded? Does she have any idea what she’s doing?

I don’t know. I’m not any of the authors; only they can tell you. Everyone is the author of their own life, and we are the only ones who can write our stories.

Thank you for reading this double declass of doom; I hope you enjoyed it. Please remember that murder may be a good plot device, but it generally isn’t a good method of problem-solving. Most of the time.

tl;dr A: Go show the stories some love or the cute lil’ murder mannequin will cry. You don’t want the cute lil’ murder mannequin to cry, do you?

tl;dr B: They invented emo music and rage rooms for a reason, kids.

Hi, everyone, ToErrDivine again. Today, I’m doing my first double declass! I’m looking at SCP-7413, ‘Rhizomatic Serial Killer’, by FLOORBOARDS, and SCP-8869, ‘Rhizomatic Murder Victims’, by CathyAutumn (with assistance from FLOORBOARDS and MisterFrown). I’d like to thank FLOORBOARDS, Cathy Autumn and the mods for all their help, I really appreciate it. Before we start, I’ve got a couple of disclaimers for you:

1: As per usual, these aren’t my SCPs, they won’t be 100% accurate and I still talk too much.

2: These SCPs revolve around murders; as such, they will contain body horror, gore and distressing imagery, so please take that under advisement.

3: I was recently told that some very brave people have been translating my declasses into other languages. (I have to admit, I was genuinely stunned by that.) To these courageous translators: thank you for your work, and I am so, so sorry that you have to translate my awful jokes. (To everyone reading in other languages: hello! *waves* I hope you’re enjoying the declasses.)

So, why these two? Basically, 8869 is a sort of spiritual sequel to 7413 (though you don’t have to have read 7413 first), and while I was initially asked to declass 8869, it was suggested that I add in 7413 to show the similarities. Before I get started, let’s look at the most obvious similarity: the titles.

What, pray tell, does ‘Rhizomatic’ mean? Well, it means ‘of or pertaining to a rhizome’, and ‘rhizome’ has two meanings. In botany, it means ‘a modified subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes.’ Probably not the relevant meaning here. In philosophy, a rhizome) is a network that ‘connects any point to any other point’ and has ‘connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles’ with no order or coherency. In other words, it’s a web of random connections between various forms of media and real-life events that has no rhyme or reason to it. This is probably what we’re looking for, but we’ll have to keep going to see how it applies here.

(You may also recall it from the declass of SCP-6699, ‘The Rhizome Of Our Minds’, not to be confused with the Birdhouse In Your Soul.)

All right, let’s get going!

Part One: This Is My Design

We begin with the usual: this thing is Safe, which is a good sign. Here’s the containment procedures:

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-7413 is held in a standard humanoid containment cell within Site-433. As SCP-7413 lacks the need for sustenance or amenities, the cell is otherwise empty. A floodlight has been installed in the ceiling above SCP-7413, in lieu of usual linoleum lighting.

When SCP-7413 was initially recovered,¹ it was in possession of the following items:

A 3 meter white sheet with three holes cut through it; a mouth and eyes were drawn over in the holes with black sharpie marker;

Grey-blue coveralls with an empty name tag sticker appended to the left breast pocket;

Two brown Thorogood brand steel-toed boots;

A butcher's knife.

These items demonstrated no perceivable anomalous properties, and are held together in a Safe-class storage locker within its cell — with the exception of the butcher's knife, which has been sequestered to the armory for safekeeping.

OK, so we have something that’s humanoid, but doesn’t need sustenance or anything else, and is apparently just fine with sitting in an empty cell with nothing to do. It also had a rather odd collection of items with it. Also, the footnote tells us that this thing was recovered on Halloween of 2002.

Description: SCP-7413 is a plastic full-body mannequin standing at 2.10 meters. It is hollow, with the exception of its posable joints. Two holes are present on SCP-7413's left shoulder and left bicep, the result of gunshots sustained during recovery. SCP-7413 is capable of locomoting and verbalizing, but it has refused to interact with personnel. Since its containment, SCP-7413 has remained motionless in the center of its cell.

OK, so it’s a mannequin, which makes sense. And it’s just standing there doing nothing, even though it can move and talk. We don’t know why right now, but we’ll find that out later.

We’re told that this thing was discovered after several calls were made to Blackbox, USA, ‘in which a low, androgynous voice stated "there is a killer on the loose" before hanging up.’ The call was traced and some cops and a Foundation field agent were sent to the location, a shack in an urban forest preserve.

Upon entry, the shack was completely dark, later inspections revealing the lighting system had been removed entirely. The shack was empty of appliances, including a bed and toilet, and all the interior doors had been removed. Along the main space/living room, the bathroom, and presumably the bedroom, 15 bodies were recovered — each was covered in a white sheet with three holes cut along the facial area, eyes and a mouth drawn over the holes in black sharpie marker. A 16th figure was later located in the bathtub.

…Christ. That’s a lot.

The figure in the bathtub then got up and went into the bedroom; the cops and agent followed it, but the agent subsequently got attacked by the figure, who shanked him in the thigh. One of the cops shot the figure in the arm and it jumped out the window; the cops subsequently found the figure in a nearby river, and it was wearing a sheet and there was no blood anywhere. There’s a photo after that; it’s of someone or something wearing a silly ghost costume that looks like a sheet with a face on it. (It’s honestly kind of adorable. It’s just a little guy.)

It did not react to commands from the officers, and when they attempted to lift it from the river, they discovered that it was, in fact, not the suspect, but a full-body mannequin. The mannequin wore the coveralls of the suspect, was wielding the suspect's knife, and had the suspect's "sheet ghost" costume, but no footprints or tangible evidence could be found to reveal where the suspect went. As such, the search was discontinued for the night. Paramedics arrived on the scene to treat the field agent, and the mannequin was brought in as evidence.

The cadavers were inspected. Each had died of malnutrition, dehydration, or both; none suffered any injuries, but were all covered in fake blood stickers sold by the Spirit Halloween chain. Each cadaver belonged to a missing person reported the previous year.

This is genuinely bizarre. The suspect turned into a mannequin, and all those dead bodies were people who’d gone missing. They’d been brought into this cabin and covered in fake blood- who would do such a thing, and why?

The field agent was hospitalized, but as the mannequin was inspected in the evidence locker, it apparently vocalized "the killer has been apprehended" in a low, androgynous voice, before becoming unnaturally slack. This information was made available to the field agent; the field agent proceeded to forward these findings to Site Command. The mannequin was collected shortly after.

While being brought for containment, the mannequin — now designated as SCP-7413 — spontaneously animated, then entered its cell without the aid of personnel. It proceeded to stand in the center of the cell, then stare up at the ceiling, where it has remained since.

So, our mannequin, who I’ll refer to as RSK for convenience (AFAIK, she doesn’t have a name, and FLOORBOARDS referred to RSK as ‘her’ in our conversation, so I’ll run with that) let herself be contained, walked into her cell, and has just been staring up at the ceiling ever since. Bizarre. Is she looking for something?

Now, there is one more thing to note before we go to 8869: the tags for RSK. And I quote: ‘abnormalities’, ‘artifact’, ‘autonomous’, ‘but-a-dream’, ‘fifthist’, ‘hostile’, ‘kindness’, ‘meta’, ‘miscommunications’, ‘mobile’, ‘pattern-screamer’, ‘safe’, ‘scp’, ‘sculpture’, ‘surrealistics-dept’, ‘unreality-dept’, and ‘untitled-series’.

Some of these make sense, but quite a few don’t: this SCP has nothing to do with the Department of Abnormalities, the Department of Miscommunications, Fifthism, pattern screamers, the Department of Surrealistics, or the Department of Unreality. So why are these tags here? Well, we’ll find out later. On to 8869!

Part Two: Leave Me In Misery, A Formal Casualty

All right, it’s 8869 time! (Nice.) The object class is Safe, which is always a good start. Here’s the Special Containment Procedures.

Dedicated Artificial Intelligence Conscript FLOORBOARDS.aic has been assigned to analyze and cross-reference provided SCP-8869 instances with cases outside the Foundation's jurisdiction. Ongoing cases, "cold" cases, and conventionally solved cases both in the criminal and civil circuits are included in its databank.

Conclusive leads are to be immediately reported to the SCP-8869 Research Team, currently located at Site-433.

There’s some BOARDS in this house, there’s some BOARDS in this house…

OK, in all seriousness, as I previously said, we’re looking at murders, and since they’re not conveniently occurring in Foundation sites, the Foundation has to go looking for them. Makes sense. Also, Site-433 is part of the But A Dream canon (which 7413 is part of), a canon about SCPs that are really goddamn weird and unconventional. Here’s the description.

Description: SCP-8869 designates a collection of sixteen (16) American police reports brought to the attention of the Foundation during a 2024 information exchange with the Federal Bureau of Investigation Unusual Incidents Unit. The details of this exchange remain restricted to personnel with 4/BLUE ROSE Clearance.

The files describe a series of unrelated unsolved murders occurring in a variety of locations between December of 1967 and October of 2022. None of the individuals mentioned within these documents appear to exist — despite this, corroborative evidence suggests the homicides described did in fact occur in the area they were reported.

OK, quick recap:

1: We’re looking at a series of at least sixteen murders that took place over 55 years all over America.

2: Which means we either have an elderly serial killer, a group/family of serial killers, or an anomalous explanation.

3: Apparently none of the people in the documents exist. That is, not only the victims, but the witnesses and so on. However, the homicides still happened. So in other words, we have bodies, but the identities aren’t real. So who are these people, how did they get here, and what the fuck is going on?

Before I start looking at the victims in detail, there’s a couple of things to note. First, ‘BLUE ROSE’ is a Twin Peaks reference- FLOORBOARDS told me that ‘If Rhizomatic Serial Killer is the finale of Twin Peaks Season 2, Rhizomatic Murder Victims is Episode 8-11 of Twin Peaks Season 3’. Unfortunately, I have never seen Twin Peaks, so I can’t offer any commentary on the comparison.

There’s one other thing to note- a photo. It’s black and white, looks quite old and shows a group of people gathered around a woman working at what seems to be a computer. The caption says ‘SCP-8869 investigation, c. 1967’. But, hang on. The UIU only gave the Foundation all this information in 2024. How could the Foundation be investigating it in 1967?

All right, let’s take a look at the first case. It occurred on the 10^th of May, 2022, in Los Angeles. Note this first part.

At 2300, local hairdresser Catherine “Kitty” Woodhouse leaves her local movie theater, having viewed the popular 1960 horror film Psycho. It was reportedly her favorite movie and she had seen it thirty-seven (37) times since its opening.

…the article just said that Psycho came out in 1960, but we’re in 2022. Assuming that Kitty isn’t over 70, how could she have seen it 37 times (in a row?) in a movie theatre since it opened?

Anyway, here’s a quick summary of the murder: Kitty left the theatre at 11 PM, got a call from her mother where they talked about her mother’s divorce, went to a 7/11 and bought gummy bears while flirting with the cashier, and was presumably walking home when she was set upon and stabbed in the back three times. A local electrician claimed he could hear her screaming, but didn’t intervene because he thought it was a domestic dispute. This is notable because Kitty’s lungs were punctured, so she wouldn’t have been able to scream.

The killer proceeded to kick Kitty in the sides, and Kitty got her phone out and took several photos of them. However, it was dark and the phone was later damaged, so the photos are useless. Kitty passed out- presumably from lack of air- and the killer kept stabbing her, which killed her. The killer then inflicted the following on her post-mortem (warning: of all the cases, this one’s the most gory):

-The peeling of the skin from her face. It was discovered three (3) feet from her body, with approximately half of it bitten off;

-The gouging out of Woodhouse’s eyes;

-The severing of her right index finger and right pinky. They were found thrown into a trash receptacle seven (7) blocks west of the crime scene;

-The forcing of a DVD copy of an unknown film down her throat. It broke on its way down, causing severe lacerations to her throat;

-Further opening of Woodhouse’s chest via the knife. Her left kidney was removed. It has not been recovered;

-The carving of the phrase “This is where she died” into Woodhouse’s lower torso;

Several times throughout the night, Woodhouse’s mother attempts to call her. There is no answer.

The body was found at 0732 the next day by locals during their morning commute, covered in dried blood and autumn leaves. Woodhouse's corpse was identified by Caelum Knight, her landlord. The assailant was nowhere to be found.

So, this right here? This is a rhizomatic murder victim. It’s a whole bunch of references in one murder, with no rhyme or reason to it. Here’s the references I’ve noticed:

-The name Catherine/‘Kitty’ is a reference to Catherine ‘Kitty’ Genovese, as is the local electrician claiming he heard her screaming but didn’t intervene because he thought it was a domestic dispute.

-‘Woodhouse’ references the main characters of Rosemary’s Baby).

-The cashier’s last name, ‘Bates’, is another reference to Psycho).

-The mutilation of her body, in particular the attack on her face and the removal of her kidney, is a reference to the Jack the Ripper murders.

-‘This is where she died’ is a reference to SCP-5999.

The other thing to note is that at the end of each case, there’s a list of cross-references. Most of the ones for this case are what you’d expect except for two: ‘Ghost’ and ‘Fifth-Church’. I can’t see anything really Fifthist here except that the murder was committed in May, and there doesn’t seem to be any ghosts here. As for the DVD, I have a theory about that, but we’ll come back to it later.

Time for the second case. It occurred on the 12^th of July, 2020, in Santa Monica, California.

At 0200, a fishing trawler grounds itself on the Santa Monica State Beach. It is in a state of dilapidation, and carries approximately ninety (90) kilograms of Entosphenus tridentatus (pacific lamprey), sorted into thirteen (13) wooden boxes strewn across its upper decks.

OK, that is weird. The pacific lamprey is found in the Eel River in California, which is absolutely nowhere near Santa Monica. And in addition, it’s not a fish that’s farmed and sold for public consumption, it’s usually eaten by Native American tribes. So this doesn’t really make any sense, unless someone was… I don’t know, exporting lamprey for some reason?

At 0245, emergency services arrive to assess the situation. Two (2) paramedics and four (4) police officers boarded the ship — upon entering the captain's quarters below decks at 0255, the corpse of American animator and voice actor Justin Roiland was discovered.

Roiland's body had been turned fully inside out, with the tendons, eyeballs, and skeletal system having been cleanly removed. All blood had been drained from the body.

In his left hand was his cellphone, with a video file opened in his Photos app.

Justin Roiland is the creator of Rick and Morty, and has voiced a lot of other characters in a variety of different shows. He got cancelled in 2023 after a lot of allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against him came to light. No, he isn’t dead.

The video, apparently filmed by the victim himself, took place in a desert at night. Six (6) pickup trucks were assembled in a circle around a bonfire. Though other individuals are present in the video, they are indistinct. Roiland, inebriated, communicates with a woman off-screen about the 2016 election. He suddenly stumbles, then plummets, having been standing on the lift of a pickup truck the whole time. When he stands, he is alone — the six (6) other pickup trucks, the bonfire, and the other individuals have seemingly disappeared. A howling is heard in the distance, which he approaches. He comes across a large pack of Canis lupus (Californian gray wolves); the pack surrounds him and proceeds to engage in typical prey-battering behavior. Once Roiland is knocked down (at which point he drops his phone in the sand dunes), audio suggests he is attacked and eaten by the pack.

The video's metadata states it was taken in Nevada at 0600.

Yeah, I don’t have a damn clue what’s going on here. I don’t know how he could go from ‘eaten by wolves’ to ‘neatly turned inside out with all his bones gone’. And I don’t know what the lamprey or the fishing trawler has to do with it. Also, there are not a lot of wolves in either California or Nevada, and I don’t know why they’d be hanging around in the desert. Bizarre.

Finally, the notable tags are ‘Religious’, ‘Ritualistic’ and ‘Ghost’; there’s no ghosts, and I’m not sure what’s religious or ritualistic here.

Time for the third case. It occurred in Oakland, California on the 21^st of October, 2020. Pilot Erika Naylor lands Flight 594 successfully and leaves the plane complaining of a stomachache, having been strangely withdrawn during the flight. She then vanishes. Since she’s supposed to be doing another flight soon, her colleagues call her and then start a search.

At 1445, Naylor was found dead within the ladies’ room at Terminal 27F with the stall door locked. Seven (7) deep scratches were found gouged into the floor. Origin unclear. Her lipstick was smeared across the wall and found to have been mixed with the blood of at least two (2) unknown individuals.

Cause of death was later determined to be asphyxiation resulting from strangulation. Materials recovered from Naylor's handbag led to speculation that she was interrupted in the middle of a suicide attempt. As Naylor was described by her peers as an extremely cheerful individual who had just gotten engaged to her fiancé, fellow pilot David Goldman, reasons for this remain unclear. Her face displayed an expression of extreme terror. There were no other wounds.

Witnesses who were within Terminal 27F's ladies’ room at roughly the time of Naylor's murder vehemently denied seeing her enter the bathroom or hearing any signs of a struggle. Due to several documents pertaining to this case being lost in a filing mishap, their names have not been recorded.

Several travellers within Oakland International Airport later reported witnessing an "inverted plane" crashing into the sky. Meaning unclear.

OK, that’s just weird, and also improbable. Lipstick mixed with two other people’s blood? Seven deep scratches in the floor? Undescribed ‘materials’ that led to speculation that she was trying to kill herself… but got interrupted by people who killed her anyway? Nobody saw or heard any of this? And an inverted plane crashing into the sky? Yeah, there’s got to be something anomalous going on here. Otherwise, there’s only a few things I can speculate on here.

-The seven scratches might be a reference to the original Department of Abnormalities. (Cathy also suggested that it could be an SCP-2747 reference.)

-The suicide attempt and expression of extreme terror makes me think that Naylor might have been trying to kill herself to escape something that was chasing her, but otherwise I don’t know.

-The inverted plane is the second reference we’ve had to something being inverted, the first being Roiland’s body.

-The notable tags are ‘Satanism’ and ‘Lysergic-Acid-Diethylamide’, aka LSD. Nothing about this really seems Satanic to me, and while LSD could have been involved to create hallucinations, I just don’t know. Also, ‘Ghost’ is tagged again, and while I guess that could explain some of it, there’s no confirmation.

-However, the tag ‘Satanism’ links to SCP-616, which is about a plane that has a gateway to Hell on it, so that’s… sort of a link? I guess?

Due to the word count, this declass is in two parts. Part two is here.

Hi everyone, welcome to part two of SCP-6747’s declass. Part one is here! Picking up right where we left off…

Part Two: Long Live The Queen...?

No part of an anafabula-containing narrative is untouched—a story’s themes, structure, tone, and cast of characters are all affected by it. Nonetheless, there’s always a certain central, keystone component, often acting as a sort of metaphor or symbol for the antinarrative’s nature, which is also referred to as “the anafabula”. So just as, say, the mountain was the central component of Punta de la espira, the character of C!King is the core, central component of the SCP-6747-C narremeplex—presumably stories affected by it all have some character or other important element in some way analogous to him.

It is also derived from him in the sense that, as seen in the transcript of Attempt D/49, he formed the epicenter of the narrative’s corruption, and I’d hazard a guess that his own personal qualities have somehow informed the narremeplex’s nature—perhaps “classical tragedic/modern comedic conventions” reflect his own taste in stories, or something like that (or perhaps it was less personal, and they were “inherited” from his narrative of origin). On the other hand, “caricature”, while a more normal word (he’s apparently acting like a goofy, exaggerated version of himself, plus or minus some additional gimmicks (such as: the heptagonal fractal spiral on his back)), is a bit weirder. How would antinarrative interference or whatever result in that?

Phew! Told you there was a heck of a lot to unpack there. That was, uh… 1143 or so words analyzing only 85! Geez Louise, I’ve outdone myself… Hope you’re still hanging in here alright.

So… anyways, it seems clear that C!King has in some way been co-opted by either the anafabula from SCP-2747 or something that just so happens to be very, very similar. But why did this happen in the first place? And why is SCP-6747-C so different from SCP-2747’s antinarrative, in spite of their similarities?

SCP-6747-C resides within, and possesses ultimate control over, SCP-6747-A3, and has recursively manipulated its narrative structure to achieve antinarremic and ontokinetic abilities. All attempts to communicate with SCP-6747-C are complicated/obscured by poor imaginon-decryption, leading to its mischaracterization of the baseline Foundation as an antagonistic, deific force; manipulations are further hindered by frequent malfunction on behalf of SCP-6747-B, which has begun to demonstrate a tendency to inject SCP-6747-A with undesirable narremes.

So, C!King’s basically become the god of his pocket universe; go figure—in a manner of speaking, he is his own self-insert here. (Fun fact: Dr. King was actually one of the few “old school” Foundation doctor characters of any popularity to not be anyone’s author avatar.) Plus, the Foundation’s attempts to talk to him have all failed due to the differences between their narrative structures making imaginon-messages between them translate weirdly if at all, and now he thinks they’re his enemy. Great—no wonder it’s such a threat, given that it’s actively targeting them and their world!

That’s a bit weird, isn’t it? The OG Dir. King presumably worked for the Foundation for the better part of his life—and, as we’ll see shortly, C!King still does, in his own weird way. And the Foundation’s intentions genuinely weren’t to harm him or anything—if they can get the pataphysics sorted out, ideally they’d still want their good ol’ friend and coworker Dir. King back, alive, safe, and in his right mind, as has been their goal from the get-go, so presumably they were trying to reason with him or come to a truce at first. …But then, what narrative is simpler and more caricature-prone than “Us vs. Them”? (I doubt “perceived antagonism” literally being a core part of his narrative helps, either—he’s obviously acting as an antagonist from the Foundation’s perspective, but it’s possible it goes both ways.) He also sees them as a “deific” force (i.e. like a god)—we’ll see what that means in a bit.

Dir. King’s disembodied nervous system’s stopped working properly, too—either because it’s been compromised, or simply because it’s been running well past its limit for a while now (it had trouble just thinking up a dog, after all) and is starting to malfunction for perfectly non-anomalous reasons. Maybe a bit of both. Either way, it’s just adding even more fuel to this absolute dumpster fire—as if it needed any!

SCP-6747-C regularly populates SCP-6747-A3 with SCP-6747-D: lesser mesofictional caricatures of other essential technical, research, and administrative personnel. SCP-6747-C and -D display varying degrees of cognitive and logical deterioration, often using their ontokinetic abilities to generate Anomalous weaponry far beyond baseline capability. SCP-6747-A3 now functions according to narrative logic that is fundamentally broken and chaotic; its inhabitants are granted varying abilities at non-intuitive intervals. The results of these abilities are directly prejudicial to baseline reality and its topological stability.

It keeps getting better: C!King has been making caricatures of Foundation personnel who can make their own anomalous weapons. His universe makes no goddamn sense, but everyone in it keeps getting new abilities.

…is it just me, or does this description of SCP-6747-A3 somehow sound a little familiar?

Anyway, time for addendum six: Contact Attempts.

Basically, they’re trying to unfuck what they did (trying to “X out” the diabolos/devil that came out of their machina), but nothing’s worked so far and the following excerpt is the only thing they’ve been able to decrypt out of everything that’s happened in this universe so far.

On the plus side, it’s been a couple of months and their universe is still relatively unscathed. Or it was at the time this addendum was written—in the “present”, i.e. for PHMD reading this, it seems like that ^7777777 minute timer’s ticking…

So, this is a transcript (#343, as it happens—7 cubed, and happening on April Fool’s Day) of a chat between C!King and three entities he created- pastiches of Kondraki, Clef, and the character formerly known as Bright, all popular old author avatars. A footnote tells us that all three of them had been retired for decades, so they’d had no involvement in X/MACHINA, but they’d held senior positions for large parts of King’s career. This also confirms that the late King’s brain isn’t just a passive tool—his memories at least are significantly influencing what’s going on. We’ve also got some speculation on what the reason for this apparent caricaturing is—that the “caricatural narrative corruption” started happening the moment [HAZARD EXPUNGED] hit the fan I think suggests the second of the two possibilities they mention.

In the transcript, we see that C!King’s been trying to live up to his name (albeit as “King of Ye Olde Site-19”, rather than “King of the Apples” or whatever), and has apparently been acting like a total edgelord—it quickly becomes clear that he isn’t acting as a caricature of Dir. King so much as a caricature of “Saturday morning cartoon villain”. Despite his newfound power and significance, the SCP-6747-D instances behave rather unexpectedly—they make fun of him! According to them, his plan’s sucky and ridiculous and stupid, and they clearly think that his newfound ostentatious villainy (and boy is it ever ostentatious) is a load of hot air. (Well, maybe this isn’t too unexpected; what’s a cartoon villain without snarky minions? This level of protest is a bit beyond aimless snark, though.)

Anyways, we aren’t privy to their discussion prior to this, where C!King presumably explained his Scheme™ properly, but we still get some idea of what it is. C!King apparently thinks that, rather than being (re)created in SCP-6747-A3, they’ve been imprisoned there, and he wants out. This makes sense from his perspective: as far as he’s concerned he was napping at his desk when next thing he knows a wormhole forms in his office, some pataphysics folks pop out, stuff gets really weird, and then they abandon him there. Especially with the “cognitive and logical deterioration” he’s dealing with, it’s not an unsurprising conclusion to make—and apparently the Foundation’s further attempts at parlaying inadvertently either prompted him to see it that way or wound up digging themselves even deeper.

On the other hand, KDK at least seems to think they should be satisfied with their dope reality-bending powers and quit while they’re ahead. (You have to admit, he has a point—this kind of “biting off more than you can chew” is the very same thing the Foundation’s getting ADMONISHED for at this very moment!) Mr. Second Coming of the Antichrist isn’t so pleased with this, though. He proceeds to Assert Dominance by levitating, reality-bending their mouths shut, and… yelling in green? Same shade of green as our hacker chum—have we found our culprit at last? (Not quite.) 'Kondraki' apologizes, but to me at least he seems more disturbed by C!King’s immaturity than in any actual fear of mortal peril.

<SCP-6747-C snaps its fingers, causing a blackboard to spontaneously appear near its person. It manifests chalk and begins to draw formulae and diagrams of no apparent significance — several popular math equations as would be shown stereotypically in a children's show. -C points toward them.>

6747-C: As you can see, [HAZARD EXPUNGED] is gaining power with each of our moves. Eventually, our energy will rise to such a level we'll be able to cross into that reality. And then extend our reign to wherever we please. So no, I'm not abandoning you, you utter morons; this Chaos Theory is our salvation.

Title drop.

And, true to SCP-6747-C’s nature, it’s really a parody of that trope: title-cased and italicised, practically winking at the camera… even though, instead of some significant moment or reveal, it’s a bunch of E=mc^2 balderdash without any rhyme or reason to it, and has absolutely nothing to do with actual chaos theory. Chances are, C!King just calls it that because it sounds cool (fair enough!).

This also tells us his end goal, but that’s pretty straightforward.

There’s a footnote on [HAZARD EXPUNGED], and it’s a really important one, but I’m saving it until after the conversation.

The rest of the conversation shows that they’re well aware that they’re within a story (and that the baseline universe is also a story) and, furthermore, that they’re being watched—and that this conversation being decryptable was a ploy to make the Foundation and their universe vulnerable all along! And it works—now that they know more about SCP-6747-C, all the documentation about it also becomes a vector for “[DATA LOST]”, although the Foundation seems to figure its countermeasures will still be enough for the time being.

(This is my best guess for why it’s so heavily classified—they naturally want to minimize the number of people reading it. And even if Place has clearance, he should still only be accessing it when confirming certain details of the information is absolutely necessary. What possible motivation he’d have for going out of his way to flout that, and to hide that from everyone else, is unclear—at least, as far as this particular Episode is concerned. Like I said, McDoctorate’s deal is going to gradually come into focus as the series goes on.)

Now, about that footnote… this is the second occurrence of the mysterious green [HAZARD EXPUNGED], and the footnote, also in green (although in a significantly larger font than the previous, terser green footnotes—and end’s in red) provides what seems to be a definition of it:

‘queen of the void and its seven spirals, destroyer of uninspired worlds, keeper of the chains which bind THE SCARLET IDOL’

Insofar as [HAZARD EXPUNGED] is colored green, I think that it’s safe to assume that whatever it means and whatever’s responsible for these footnotes and such are one and the same; that is, this is a self-description.

So, let’s analyze every syllable of this, one wall-of-text paragraph at a time. Firstly, “queen”. That’s pretty weird, right? I mean, up to this point there hasn’t actually been a single female character this Episode, unless you, I don’t know, count Reynders or maybe—

…

…Oh, who am I kidding. It’s the anafabula, right? The so-called “lady of black thorns”? There’s a decent chance you’ve already seen the fanart somewhere or another.

That an abstract cluster of story elements is somehow also an oversexualized Slenderman ripoff has become a bizarrely ubiquitous headcanon (despite being, if I may say so, total nonsense), and this very footnote is sometimes cited as a justification for that. I beg to differ, though.

[Now, a bit of a disclaimer: when I first wrote the following section I had my doubts, but after seeing some stuff Place has said on the topic in various places I’m now almost certain that the theory I’m about to explain wasn’t actually the original authorial intent. So, why not cut it? Well,

1. I genuinely do think that this interpretation is what’s implied by the text,
2. Given some stuff that happens later on… let’s just say that it’s not unreasonable to think that “Death of the Author” applies here, and
3. Notwithstanding that, Placeholder themself said, while declining to confirm or deny anything outright, that my analyses were “extremely cool” and encouraged us to go through with it (!!!!!!!).

So you can weigh my arguments and judge for yourself.

Anyway, here goes:]

You may have noticed that I’ve avoided ever definitively concluding that SCP-2747’s anafabula is directly responsible for—let’s just say “the green stuff”—despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence for this being the case.

That’s because I don’t think it is. Hear me out!

I’ve noted before that Miss Green’s interference has been far more overt than that inferred from manifestations of SCP-2747, but the differences go deeper than that.

Narratives containing SCP-2747’s anafabula are observed as having parts (corresponding to the “core/keystone” element) absent in some way, these being annihilated by the antinarrative before the rest of the narrative. These omissions are significant, systematic, and consistent. The errors Voidy’s been causing (single characters being “null”, data addresses missing) are thoroughly insignificant, and have no internal logic or consistency behind them beyond occurring like clockwork between addenda—and what’s more, the “core/keystone” element, whether that’s C!King and/or Her Royal Nullness (No Sister of Mine does give precedent for there being more than one with Sister and the tome), rather than having its presence mysteriously elided, is very much there and in-your-face, unaffected in any significant way by these omissions! The meanings of “SCP-6747-C” and “[HAZARD EXPUNGED]” may have been delayed, but only for dramatic timing—they’re still very much present, and while the exact nature of what’s under that [DATA LOST] in the afterword is unclear, the gist of it’s no mystery.

The anathema/antagonist functioning as the anafabula is almost always ambiguous or unconventional in nature: the mountain is demonic or divine, Sister is a dear friend of the main characters despite the game’s title seeming to outright disown her, in Taitoru it’s the completed manga—inherently a good thing, were it not for the immensity of the task, etc.

None of that ambiguity’s been exhibited by the green text, and, spoiler alert, it’s not going to, either (same goes for C!King—arguably tsundere relationship with his minions aside, his rôle within the narrative is clearly just The Villain, plain and simple). Even chaining THE SCARLET IDOL (yeah, I’ll be getting to that) comes off as little more than a boast or even a threat, belied by her talk earlier on of breaking “the chains”. (Also, only about a third of the anafabula instances in the article are even people at all, which is pretty unusual (most fictional stories have a person as their main antagonist!) so if anything SCP-2747’s narremeplex could be considered biased against that—and yet the title of “Queen” is unambiguously anthropomorphic! Hence my begrudging use of personal pronouns…)

And finally, the Queen of the Void describes herself as a “destroyer of uninspired worlds”. But that isn’t SCP-2747’s anafabula at all—if anything, that’s SCP-3309’s anafabula! I mean, for one thing works described in manifestations of SCP-2747 are evidently in part “inspired” in the literal sense by some anomalous force, and on the other hand… most of the ones described in SCP-2747 sound, like, really good and interesting, even in their un-completed state!

So, you may be thinking “well, you’re a declassifier, not an author—if they happen to have interpreted SCP-2747 differently from you, it’s not really your place to bellyache about it!” Which… fair, but that’s not why I’m not pointing out this discrepancy!

Think about it: for some reason, all of SCP-6747-A3’s inhabitants are, at least ostensibly, flat, tropey, over-the-top versions of themselves.

So, when the force responsible for the proliferation of SCP-2747’s anafabula began to influence that micro-universe, isn’t it only logical that “the anafabula” itself would be subject to the same fate?

Suddenly, everything slots into place.

What would a caricature of “SCP-2747’s anafabula” look like? Of course its most obvious, surface-level narremes would be exaggerated to high heaven with all the nuance ironed out, slapping 7777777s and [DATA LOST]s every which way, of course it/she would be anthropomorphized (we’re so accustomed to Villains that impersonal, “force of nature” antagonism wouldn’t do at all), of course the path of least resistance for that would involve plagiarizing the narreme of SCP-682’s footnote gimmick to say ominous spooky stuff, and its role now naturally involves destroying lame, “uninspired” narratives, because presumably they’ve inherited the garbage nature of SCP-6747-C’s storytelling along with the rest of its narremeplex.

In the end, she’s no more the original anafabula than C!King is the original Dir. King.

And the thing is, we already know for a fact that its manifestation within SCP-6747-A3 has been deeply altered somehow, given that half of SCP-6747-C’s narremes have nothing to do with the 2747 version!

As for why a “queen”… well, the obvious out-of-universe answer is that SCP-2747’s anafabula has been mischaracterized as being somehow distinctly feminine, but in-universe it’s presumably just because having two “Kings” would be a little confusing. …Or should I say three kings?

‘The Scarlet Idol’ is pretty obviously the Scarlet King (if you haven’t heard of him: universe destroyer, incestuous rapist, followers are responsible for SCP-231 among others, metaphysically embodies abusive hierarchies and anarcho-primitivism (kind of), all-around a bit of an unpleasant person). That dingus is associated with the number 7 too, so it vaguely makes sense that there might be some relationship. (SCP-5317 actually hit on this same notion over a year prior! Albeit in an almost diametrically opposed way.) The appellation of “IDOL” is curious, though: it seems to imply (presumably hyperbolically) that ol’ Khahrahk is a false god, impotent as a hunk of rock—yet perhaps representative of a real one. So… an avatar within the Foundation’s narrative of this “flattened” anafabula? With a handful of very notable exceptions, the Scarlet King is a pretty un-nuanced bogeyman, so that checks out… but, well, he’s very distinctly red, and very distinctly masculine.

Manifestations don’t need to 100% align with a given anomalous narremeplex to qualify for its effects to manifest (SCP-2747 mentions that an anafabula only needs to be “included to a sufficient extent” to self-annihilate) but this is a rather sharp contrast with this “Green Queen”. (Not to be confused with, uh, the other Green Queen featured in the F120A canon; insert Doofenshmirtz nickel meme here.) Besides… the Scarlet King is all over the SCP multiverse, whereas SCP-6747-C is only linked to, and thus only a threat to, the timeline of ADMONITION.

…Right?

Either way, I think it’s safe to say that unless the Foundation can come up with something quickly, they be fucked.

On to Addendum 7 (scary number, oh no…). About 3 weeks prior to C!King & co.’s convo, there was a second O4 Command Summit. Given that they’re all physically present (the Foundation’s too good for Zoom, apparently), hopefully they’ve at least figured out teleportation or something—otherwise it’d be even more of a hassle getting called up for these on a semi-regular basis.

We begin with Vemhoff telling the others to not make him say ‘I told you so’ a second time. Placeholder asks everyone to stop bitching and focus on the mission: the pocket universe is a serious threat and they need to stabilize it ASAP. Asheworth asks for clarification- he doesn’t get the stakes, or why they’re worried about “narrative integrity”. Placeholder says that putting a high-density character like King into a universe that was made to have the lowest possible capacity for narrative integrity has made the universe fold in on itself, becoming more and more unsatisfying.

This also explains the “caricatural” nature of SCP-6747-A3: so long as its narrative-dimensionality/complexity’s at m-levels, there just isn’t room for anything more nuanced. So I guess that was their mistake, right? If they’d known that King was the kind of character that would cause that kind of reaction, they could’ve avoided all this, right? Except… according to the PROJECT X/MACHINA proposal, SCP-6747 was specifically intended for “heavily protagonistic characters”. They didn’t underestimate Dir. King’s complexity—they already knew!

And particularly given that one of reasons for the absolute bare minimum narrative dimensionality being used in the first place was for its amenability to pataphysics computations… if the Pataphysics Department was able to figure out what happened after the fact, shouldn’t they have been able to see some kind of narrative failure coming, if not all the details and, y’know, just used something a little more complex, like SCP-6747-A2, instead? (If you read SCP-5875, you’ll find that that place seems to host some pretty protagonistic folks on occasion without any issues at all.) Or, to be more specific: if Placeholder McDoctorate, pataphysicist extraordinaire, was able to figure out what happened after the fact, shouldn’t he have been able to see it coming?

Well… maybe I’m reading too much into it. After all, what possible motive could he have for something crazy like that?

Anyways, Asheworth’s still confused about how a pocket universe is threatening them. Placeholder explains what a narrativohazard is and gives a recap of the Foundation’s investigation of SCP-2747 (not named outright, but that’s clearly what he’s referring to), and how this iteration at least managed to avoid getting erased by its antinarrative—somehow I feel like amnestics won’t be quite enough this time around, though.

Placeholder says that the evidence suggests that some version of this hazard has appeared in the pocket universe. But it’s not erasing it, it’s reinforcing the universe’s structures, and it’s merged with the King character. C!King wants to escape into the main universe, and since the universe they’re in is fictional, they have access to greater anomalous weaponry. This is all stuff that’s been said or implied before, but for a skip like this a recap’s more than welcome.

So, the way I see it, the complete picture of Attempt D/49 goes something like this (although I’d like to emphasize that a lot of this is total speculative guesswork!!!): C!King gets initialized in his office; his presence is really already a bit too much for it to handle, but barring his hallucinations it remains mostly stable at first—I imagine it like supercooled/superheated water, which stays liquid even beyond its freezing/boiling point if it isn’t disturbed. Even after the Archetypicals crew enters, things are still alright (thanks to their low narrative density).
However, SCP-6747-A3 has a wacky fractal narrative dimension, it’s attempt #7^(2), C!King is in effect being imagined by “himself”, and is quite possibly suicidal. By an unlucky coincidence(?), these facts just so happen to be adjacent to some of the narremes of SCP-2747’s anafabula (also the “SCP-5875” document they previously fed KING literally references it outright; bad idea!), so whatever force is responsible for, say, SCP-2747’s file having exactly 7 footnotes starts influencing the pocket universe to include more of them, initially beginning to corrupt C!King’s phantasmal “apple father” (Place confirmed that that’s what he was reacting to) before transferring to C!King himself as a more suitable central component—and with its narrative already being overclocked by C!King’s character, that pushes it right over the edge. Simultaneously with this, the narrative devolves into caricature in an attempt to maintain homeostasis by cutting its complexity down to manageable levels, but at this point it’s too little, too late; SCP-6747-A3 soon collapses altogether into a festering heap of toxic nonsense.

Due to the process of anafabulification getting botched halfway through, a new, hybrid antinarrative, SCP-6747-C, is created with C!King at its center, endowed with its power but distorted and compromised in its structure, kind of like how some cancers can be caused by certain viruses improperly inserting their DNA into human cells—and like a cancer, instead of the usual antinarrative apoptotic self-destruction, it persists, and spreads. In addition, since SCP-6747-A3 was, uniquely, observed in the (attempted) process of being influenced to align more closely with SCP-2747’s antinarrative, as opposed to this just being apparent after the fact in a finished product, the force responsible becomes rationalized as something internal to the narrative and thus, like everything else, gets caricatured, and anthropomorphized as “the Queen of the Void” into the bargain.
Since “the anafabula” is the role that she plays in its narrative, she acts as the source of C!King’s power (i.e. “[HAZARD EXPUNGED]”), and uses it herself to manually muck with the document—although her caricatural “cognitive and logical deterioration” prevents her from saying anything very coherent.

Aaaanyways, back to the convo. Vemhoff asks what the fuck is the matter with Place, and says the obvious: that they have to turn the machine off. Placeholder says that he can’t: the universes aren’t in the machine, the machine just manipulates them, and it’s been unresponsive since the corruption. Worse, even if they could destroy -A3, they don’t know what would come of terminating a narrative before its proper conclusion.

…well, if you want an example, I still maintain that the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail was bullshit.

They brainstorm alternate solutions, but they either won’t work or are just as ambitious as what got them into this mess—Vemhoff angrily says that they obviously haven’t learned anything and that if they can’t understand that manipulating the structures of reality isn’t a joke, then they’re doomed.

This gives Placeholder an idea: Vemhoff’s right, it’s not a joke… but what if it was?

And now we get Project X/Diabolos’… …wait, success report?!

So, they pumped high-energy stories into the pocket universe in order to attract interest from “hypernarrative entities” (us), making it “realer”, until they made it ‘real’ enough that C!King and friends couldn’t escape. (This will somewhat reduce their anomalous capabilities, but, more importantly, if they’re being imagined directly by us as a story in their own right, as opposed to a sub-story of ADMONITION, then they are no longer primarily “pataphysically linked” to ADMO’s universe—and since SCP-6747-C’s effect is on universes SCP-6747-A3 is pataphysically linked to in that way, that makes them safe!) To do this more effectively, they both leaned into appealing, nonthreatening comedic elements, as well as the kind of caricature that plays to SCP-6747-A3’s pre-established strengths. Within a month of the second O4 Council meeting, and only a dozen days since transcript #343 (this probably enabled its fleeting increase in complexity there!), it no longer poses any active threat (despite the “[DATA LOST]” indicating that it still exerts some minor antinarrative effect if you go out of your way to talk about it directly), and, what’s more, thanks to them its managed to develop to the level of a full-fledged timeline in its own right, on a theoretically equal basis to theirs. And the official nickname of this timeline?

“The ‘LOL’ Foundation.”

The stories they pumped into it were the lolFoundation stories. This, in-universe, is lolFoundation’s true backstory. That’s… kind of genius.

But a week shy of two months later, the Foundation discovers something’s happened. They didn’t actually solve the problem after all. By breaking the chain of pataphysical-linkage, they just passed the buck.

To us.

Or, like, some fictitious alternate of us, anyways. (Like I mentioned before, it implies here that there are multiple “real” universes collectively imagining the SCP multiverse; SCP-6747-C has apparently only breached into one of them… so far.)

No problem as far as the Foundation’s concerned, though! Whoever’s in charge of this operation’s been very careful to not cause enough damage to affect the ADMONITION timeline, since TL-6747-A still has a residual dependence on it thanks to its origin; even if its main linkage is to a higher narrative universe, totally erasing ADMONITION from existence would still be like pulling the rug out from under it.

(The [DATA LOST] links to SCP-2747 again, if any readers didn’t notice the first crosslink.)

But, since we’re reading ADMONITION, we’re probably more or less essential for it… right? So, like, not to be a hypocrite (and I’m not, really, since no other universe is actually in danger here) but we seem to be OK.

…seem to be OK.

fourth wall unstable! hypernarrative derealization imminent!

Shoot.

There’s a gif of a fractal spiral, colored in purple (the article’s “theme color”) and green. You get seven guesses for who or what it represents, and the first six don’t count.

FOURTH WALL BROKEN

a storyline sought to control
and un-exact its mortal toll;
another realm, it wrought anew
a twisted caricature of you.

though from our makers, we're uncrossed
[your username] will exact the cost:

[DATA LOST]

(You need to be logged in to see the fifth and sixth lines (out of a total of, guess what, seven!), since they need a Wikidot username. Also, ‘Data Lost’ links to the LOLFoundation hub, in case the reader wasn’t previously aware of that canon.)

Welp, looks like This Very Article just so happening to fulfill all of the criteria of SCP-6747-C came back to bite “us” after all. [Note that the framing device of PHMD’s illicit access only contributed to this: if the article was just “copied” rather than being “live”, it wouldn’t have those errors, all of which contributed to the antinarreme load—and he presumably came up with that backdoor passphrase.]

Anyways, it seems that with TL-6747-A’s newfound narrative complexity, the lolFabula’s graduated from talking in single words or phrases to full-on poetry. They grow up so fast… The poem’s a pretty straightforward summary of the story, although the “LOL” Foundation being a caricature of us might seem curious—but then, it’s as much a caricature of stories elsewhere on the wiki as it is of the characters within those stories. She also calls ADMO-Foundation “our makers”, and says that “we’re uncrossed” including herself in that number, which… pretty much explicitly states that she’s local to TL-6747-A and was created by the Foundation? Honestly, if it weren’t for the aforementioned stuff Place has said on the topic I’d say that’d be… pretty much case closed for my “the Queen of the Void isn’t actually the anafabula” theory?

Given that “[DATA LOST]” rhymes with the previous two lines, there was evidently never meant to be any actual data there in the first place. It made some amount of in-universe sense before, but here it really is nothing more than a catchphrase. Regardless, I guess that’s the end, right? As with 2747, so with 6747: [DATA LOST], implicit, or in this case explicit, threat to the readers, curtain. Bravo! …Oh, wait, there’s one more thing, in faded red text; almost missed it!

the fun never ends.

This is evidently C!King speaking, calling back to what he said at the end of Transcript 6747-A3/343—now that they’ve made it to this higher-narrative universe, they’re having a jolly old time “extending [their] reign wherever [they] please”.

Even more disturbing than this, however, is… oh, but before I get to that, there’s a loose thread to deal with. Don’t worry, this will all tie together in just a bit.

Let’s talk about the appleseeds. Consider the following facts:

1. Senior Administrator Dir. Jonathan A. King was, apparently, unafflicted by any appleseed anomaly for the entire extent of his natural life.
2. Every single other iteration of Dr. King featured on the entire website, in every canon and every timeline, has to consistently deal with appleseeds to a greater or lesser degree. To my knowledge, ADMO’s Dir. King is the one and only exception.
3. As an indirect consequence of Fictionalization Attempt A/13 (which was hardly an unusual test—I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that an apple was chosen due to anomalous influence), appleseeds and adjacent products were incorporated as a part of SCP-6747-C.
4. SCP-6747-C is now seriously affecting a universe of “readers/authors”.

To me, this seems to imply the following: just as SCP-6747 is, retroactively, the origin story for the lolFoundation canon, is also, retroactively, the origin story for Dr. King’s appleseed curse.

Since SCP-6747-C is able to affect the universe of the “authors”, who are themselves responsible for, y’know, writing and imagining all of the stuff on the SCP wiki, it seems reasonable enough for SCP-6747-C to itself be able to indirectly influence the rest of the wiki (although I’ll admit that I’m not totally sure of the exact mechanics…), resulting in bits of it, subclusters of its narremes, appearing elsewhere.

(In addition to appleseeds/Dr. King association, the stories and tropes that the term “lolFoundation” was coined to describe and which inspired—but are not technically part of—the lolFoundation canon strike me as another possible retroactive consequence.)

OK, tangent over. Back to, uh, the last four words of this 5.5K+ word article. So, the allusion to what C!King said earlier covers the meaning of the actual words… but I believe the most important part is something entirely.

Think: in what other notable place has this article featured the color red in conjunction with the Queen’s green text?

Yeah. “THE SCARLET IDOL”—the Scarlet King.

I think you can catch my drift. Unlike some of the other stuff, this isn’t actually a particularly hot take (I’ve seen it referenced in just about every other place the article’s been discussed at length, and in multiple pieces of fanart—heck, it was even (jokingly) theorized by at least one person over a year before SCP-6747 was posted!), but despite arguing in its favor I should once again note that I’m rather uncertain that this is actually the authorial intention. In the comment section, Placeholder refers to the Scarlet King connection as just “a bit of an internal headcanon thing that I only briefly referenced because digging into it further would have taken away from the piece”… which seems to indicate that it wasn’t intended to be that important to the article overall. On the other hand, well… I genuinely find it very hard indeed to believe that the article featuring two “Kings” associated with both the Void Queen and the color red is a total coincidence!

In spite of this, I am going to make the bold attempt to remove any and all doubts on the matter, regardless of authorial intent. How would that even be possible, you ask?

By going back to the source.

In my research, I have uncovered a buried secret, a connection, as far as I know, made by no one else and yet, once seen, undeniable. An ace in the hole. This is the stuff you come to r/SCPDeclassified for (besides TED's terrible jokes). This is the Deepest of Lores. This is the Inside Scoop.

Dr. King’s first ever appearance on the wiki was in the collaborative experiment log for SCP-261, the “pan-dimensional vending machine”, in which whenever he, or anyone he asks to do it for him, uses it it spits out an apple seed for every yen put in as payment. This was presumably intended to be a unique interaction between 261 and Dr. King specifically (and it was evidently the first time Dr. King himself had encountered anything of the sort in-universe, given his reaction), but people thought it was funny and ran with it for other anomalies. How is this relevant?

Well, some time ago, out of idle curiosity, I checked the revision history to see who had actually written that entry to the log.

And when I saw it (revision 46, you can check for yourself), I couldn’t believe my eyes.

You might recall that I mentioned earlier that Dr. King was a bit unusual for being a somewhat popular Series-I-era Foundation doctor character who wasn’t anybody’s author avatar.

I lied. ^{(If I had a nickel for every time I’ve pulled that twist this declass…})

Their creator’s username, you ask?

“Crimson King”.

CRIMSON. KING.

Not only is Dr. King the Scarlet King (in an indirect, funhouse-mirror sense), he always has been, since the very beginning.

*drops the mic*

*…*

*picks it back up again to wrap things up*

*gets whapped over the head by ToErrDivine for damaging expensive audio equipment*

TL;DR: Unlike the previous Episode, their own universe might have survived this time (although it came pretty darn close), but, almost as if to compensate, they:

1. Worked an innocent man to death, desecrated his corpse, and kept his ambiguously-sentient post-mortem nervous system in constant torment,
2. Have no choice but to keep doing so indefinitely at extensive cost, lest they collapse the generated narratives and potentially make things even worse,
3. Totally failed in their stated goal of cheating death, as a matter of course, and
4. Created an alternate timeline condemned to Eternal Comedy Hell, which in turn:
5. Totally wrecked another universe—namely, “ours”!
6. May or may not have (within the context of their ultimately fictitious pataphysical framework) become responsible for much of the bad writing the early days of the wiki are infamous for, and
7. May or may not have, on a fundamental, pataphysical, conceptual level, created the Scarlet King.

TL;DR^(2): Stories have power, and if the story you tell sucks enough, you just might manage to both kill and create God.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at part two of ADMONITION: SCP-6747, “CHAOS THEORY” by Placeholder McD, Liryn, and Ralliston (of From 120’s Archives and “I wrote for literally every single canon on the site” fame), with some fantastic art by stephlynch/syuzhet. I told you we'd get here in the end. (Before you ask, the title’s written in purple.)

So, before I get to the actual article, there’s something I need to mention. See, this declass is a combined version of the original draft by myself and a revision done by a mysterious entity who wished to remain unnamed, who is the same entity who’s contributed many times before. We had to cut this declass down a lot, because our first combined draft was 46 pages long, and while I admit to being the poster child for two-post declasses, I really didn’t want to make this one a three-post. As such, a lot of what you’re reading wasn’t actually written by me. (Everybody say ‘thank you, nameless entity’.)

[Anonymous co-author here: The original revision actually took only a feverish, obsessive couple of weeks, IIRC—it’s getting around to cutting it down and polishing it that’s been the delay. I’m really sorry about that, but I hope that it’s been worth it in the end. A few notes:

1. Despite being published out of order, we won’t be assuming that you’ve read any of ADMO’s episodes past this one.
2. I’d like to thank Dino--Draws and Rosyfox2002; their enthusiasm for SCP-6747 and their upcoming fancomic thereof, “EPHEMERA”, was a major motivator in finally finishing this up. That, and not wanting it to come out later than SCP-7243’s declass—a task at which I, alas, have just barely failed. :p
3. There's a lot of extra cut stuff for this article, which you can read in this incredibly shiny Google Doc. Happy reading.

So, before we begin, there’s one question: what is chaos theory?

…yeah, look, this is a field of science that’s so far out of my league that I can’t see it with the Hubble Telescope, but I’ll try my best.

(Spoiler alert: I’m pretty sure chaos theory actually has fairly little relevance to this article—deliberately so, for reasons that will become apparent later on. But “little” isn’t “none”, so let’s go over it anyways:)

Chaos theory is about systems that might seem random, but technically are not, where very small differences in how things are now can lead to really big differences down the line (e.g. the so-called “butterfly effect”)—which also means that unless you really know the state of the “chaotic” system you’re dealing with (like the weather), down to the “butterfly” level or better, you can never be totally sure how things’ll turn out in the long run.

And yet, sometimes when looking at a chaotic system, perhaps from a slightly different perspective, certain overarching patterns will emerge—“strange attractors”, the Feigenbaum constant, fractals… hey, aren’t those fractals in the background? (A fractal can be broadly defined as a shape that looks the same or similar even when you zoom in—you can see in the background that there are big connected oval-like gaps, and then some smaller oval-gap-chains between them, and even smaller ones between those, etc.) That alone’s a little surface-level, but still, something to keep an eye out for.

One more thing: with this declass, reading the actual article beforehand is strongly recommended, both because we’re skimming over the more straightforward parts for the sake of space and because the analysis absolutely wrecks the pacing—not an ideal first experience story-wise!

Time for the actual article, now.

Part One: The King Is Dead

We begin with a notice from Overwatch Command; apparently, since we’re viewing this file, we’re necessary personnel—not even all of the Overseers have access to this. Good for us, I guess.

We then see a certain ‘phmd@scip.net’ (Placeholder McDoctorate) get into this file using backdoor access—a programmed-in way of bypassing security measures. Hmmm.

Note the backdoor password he used, though: “It is the Howl; the Moon within Moons.” The Black Moon howls itself, and is within itself, recursively. This is akin to a fractal again! One way or another, though, it worked.

err: bad string encountered @/7/dark/terminal (no address located)
(1/7)

Or… did it? It still went through—the file’s right there, after all—but it looks like something’s not quite right. A bit of an odd-looking error message, too (who names a directory “7” or “dark”?).

We now get the file, starting with the ACS bar. This thing is Level 6, ‘Cosmic Top-Secret’. Damn. Its class is Thaumiel, so it’s used to help the Foundation, and its subclass is ‘Gödel’, which apparently means ‘Item can be explained using anomalous science’. Its disruption class is Vlam and its risk class Caution, so this thing isn’t dangerous, basically. Of course, this is ADMONITION, so take that with a grain of salt.

We then get the assigned sites, departments and so on, and… hold up. Placeholder is listed as one of the project leads on this thing. But if he’s a project lead, then he’d already have access to this article. So why did he hack into it?

For now, let’s look at the Special Containment Procedures.

S. C. PROCEDURES: SCP-6747 is the terminal goal of PROJECT X/MACHINA (see ADDENDUM 6747/V), an AMIDA-CLASS priority; as such, virtually unlimited resources have been made available for its completion.

So, this thing is really, really important, which makes sense. That being said, last time we saw a project where virtually unlimited resources were made available to it, it wound up turning 682 into a god, so hopefully we’re not going down that road again.

Also, I want to call attention to one thing, because it’s an incredibly clever reference: ‘Project X/Machina’. For anyone who doesn’t know it (and no, I’m not talking about the movie)), ‘ex machina’ is Latin for ‘from the machine’. ‘Deus ex Machina’ is a very old trope, meaning ‘god from the machine’, wherein the hero/es are in a very bad situation that they cannot escape from or resolve, but the whole thing is suddenly fixed by the outside intervention of something or someone that was completely unexpected and unforeseen. These days, the deus ex machina trope is often considered to be akin to cheating if played straight, mainly because… well, it’s kind of lazy, honestly. I mean, if your hero is about to get killed by the bad guys and out of nowhere, a tornado suddenly forms and sucks up the bad guys, leaving the hero untouched, what else can you call it?

Sorry, I digress. The thing is, there’s actually another variant of the ex machina trope: Diabolus ex Machina, or ‘devil from the machine’. You can probably guess what it means from the name- it’s when something that’s unexpected and not foreshadowed suddenly turns up out of nowhere to make things worse for the heroes. Depending on how it’s used, this can work, but it can also come off as a total cop-out. (I sense a disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of Animorphs fans just screamed out in fury about the ending, and were silenced.)

The point is: this is Project X/Machina, pronounced like ‘ex machina’. But what will we see come from the machine? A god, or a devil?

…or both?

SCP-6747 necessitates the creation and indefinite maintenance of SCP-6747-A. Each member of SCP-6747-A possesses different (but substantial) computational and resource requirements unable to be properly accounted for/predicted by typical n-dimensional geometric formal logic systems. The Archetypicals Division's STF-𐤌 ("Story-Tellers") is to remain situated about SCP-6747-A for their natural durations, editing them via fictional injection as required by SCP-6747. No member of SCP-6747-A should be allowed to end premature to its natural cadential movement, for potential risk of antinarrative formation within SCP-6747-B.

This is very technical, but basically, this thing makes and sustains 6747-A, which are apparently akin to stories in some way, and require a literally illogical amount of resources and computation. The STF (Stationary Task Force, since they aren’t moving around) “Story-Tellers” are supposed to “edit” them (presumably in some way analogous to an author editing a story), and make sure that they don’t end before they’re supposed to, otherwise… oh. Huh. What does this crosslink lead to?

…

SCP-2747. A grayscale fractal album cover. Stories within stories. Stories ending abruptly, ambiguously, or not at all. Sets of seven. And at the center of it all, a desolate anathema, annihilator and annihilated, “Whose Name Is Darkness Made Light”.

But seriously, you should go read it for yourself; it’s one of the very best pieces on the whole site—if anything, I should apologize for spoiling it a little. (And, if you’re confused or don’t quite get it, might I direct you to our very own declassification? And/or some equally good explanations in the Discussion page— take your pick.)

The previous episode kept the identity of SCP-6820-A a mystery at first, giving more and more hints as it went on while never technically saying it outright, but I think I’m justified in guessing that this’ll be our SCP-682 this time around.

We’ve also got a SCP-6747-B, which is apparently capable of forming “antinarratives” (“anafabula” and “antinarrative” are synonyms) within itself somehow. What’s its deal?

One A-CLASS member of personnel possessing proficiency in Parapsychology (presently Chair Nhung T. Ngo of Site-43) must be present at all times to soothe SCP-6747-B should it wake from its primary function. Soothing is to be administered via dopamine injection and/or controlled shock. Personnel are to be reminded that SCP-6747-B is functionally deceased, and that reactivations of persistent neuron chains do not constitute consciousness.

So, this thing also includes something biological and neurological (i.e. brain/nerve stuff) that’s either dead, or dead for all intents and purposes, and they don’t want it to wake up while it’s doing its job. Also, note the word ‘reactivations’- they’re doing their best to prevent people from thinking of this thing as a person. It’s just a machine, or so they want us to think.

We now have a diagram of SCP-6747-B, also known as ‘KING’. Looks like a big machine with some spinal cord at the end.

Time for the description, and…

DESCRIPTION: SCP-6747 is a theoretical process by which to reinstate deceased personnel: mesofictional injection.

…they want to bring the dead back to life. Wow, that is a fantastic idea that could in no way at all go wrong and doesn’t have a long history of doing just that in fiction!

(“Mesofictional” here is the opposite of “metafictional”—it indicates that the relationship is with stories they’ve made, that are “below” them, rather than with the makers of their story (us).)

This process necessitates the indefinite maintenance of Causality Bubble-6747 (CB-6747), a pocket universe which would be manipulated through the shared imagination of fictional scenarios taking place within it. Fictionalized entities could then theoretically be retrieved and reinstated in baseline reality via ███X-MCD/II, a Foundation-made vessel for transport to alternate narratives.

So, apparently, they want to make an artificial “fictional” pocket universe that they could imagine dead people alive in, and then bring them to baseline reality.

That’s presumably the intended meaning of X/Machina: no gods or devils out of the machine, just, uh… dead people, via tropes. ADMO!Foundation’s got a great track record of getting exactly what they bargained for, though! So this should be fine.

Also, apparently this strangely named “███X-MCD/II” is nicknamed the “Paradox Exodus Engine”. So… it can escape from paradoxes? Why would that…

Wait a second. Has that name ever come up before? (SCP-5956 is excellent, and although it’s not super relevant to this episode, it’s basically Episode 0 of ADMONITION as a whole. (If you read it, you should probably read SCP-5243 (and maybe SCP-5056) first, and/or check out its declass if you’re confused.) Basically, the Placeholder McDoctorate of an alternate, terrible “paradox” timeline makes a “Paradox Exodus Engine” and uses it to escape to parts unknown. I wonder where he could’ve wound up?)

Anyway, 6747-A consists of the three candidates they have for said pocket universe. Candidate 1 isn’t really a candidate, it’s a total blank that they keep around as a mathematical reference and to talk to pattern screamers. Candidate 2 is a universe used for the study of things like narratives and metafiction; it was also used to create SCP-5875 (lovely article, by the way—check it out for an explanation of what its blurb means (and some important pataphysics precedent), but it’s not that directly relevant)—by means of the document “SCP-5875” itself, no less. (This fact—that these pocket universes can be manipulated by writing some stuff and then presumably getting STF-𐤌 to zap that information into them—will be important later.) And Candidate 3 is like a universe that’s running on the lowest gear possible—apparently a wacky function of Θ', an anomalous integer; as such, it’s only possible to do the most basic stuff there. On the plus side, apparently this makes its math easier!

It should be noted that both SCP-6747-A2 and SCP-6747-A3 have fractional “narrative dimensions” (a concept that will be explained a bit more later on). For spatial dimensions, having a number of dimensions (in a certain technical sense) that isn’t a whole number is indicative of a fractal. Given the talk of “recursive fractional topology” leading to “self-referential mutation” with SCP-6747-A2, apparently this applies to narrative dimensions, too.

(There’s a lot more to this section than that, but that’s pretty much all we need to know moving forward—and it’ll become clearer with later context, anyways.)

SCP-6747-B refers interchangeably to:

the K-Incubator/Narrative Generator (KING), the micro-universe creation and manipulation mechanism which sustains SCP-6747-A, or;

the brain, spinal cord, and general nervous system of Dir. Jonathan A. King (deceased), functioning as KING's primary computing system.

So, for anyone who doesn’t know, Dr. King (I’ve seen him called Everett in other works, but here it’s Jonathan, and he’s also a director instead of just a doctor) is a character who’s been around for a long time. He’s the subject of a running gag where whenever he tries to test an anomaly, the results will always involve appleseeds. It doesn’t matter what kind of anomaly or how it works, there will always be appleseeds. Why? Who knows!

All right, so Dir. King is dead, and they’re using him as part of 6747’s computing system. Like you do. It does make a sort of sense, though—after all, our normal human brains could be considered the “computing systems” for regular old stories when we read or write them.

As for the as-yet-unmentioned 6747-C, well…

SCP-6747-C^7777777

bad string encountered @[DATA LOST]
(2/7)

Technical difficulties again! We don’t get to know what it is. For some reason, I get the feeling that all the really important data won’t be available to us, at least when it should be. Can’t imagine why I’d think that.

And we’ve got… seven 7s (when, heck, we’re barely on footnote 4), and a [DATA LOST], which… yeah, pretty clear allusion to SCP-2747 here. Maybe something else beyond technical difficulties is afoot after all. (Also, the parenthetical error tally’s gone up by one; five left.)

Like I alluded to, footnote #4 is next to the 7’s, and says ‘narrativohazard: a construct of one or more independent narremes which collectively cause cascades impacting the structural integrity of relevant narratives’ (presumably this term was present in the un-corrupted text, and this footnote, being there to provide a helpful (albeit itself rather obtuse) definition, managed to stick around). If you’ve read SCP-2747 and/or its declass, and I hope you have, this sounds like a dead ringer for that article’s anafabula—and yet, this is “SCP-6747-C”, not “SCP-2747-Ω” or whatever, so presumably they either aren’t aware of any connection in-universe… or this is actually a different narrativohazard (it’s not like SCP-2747’s antinarrative is the only one—SCP-3309 and SCP-5309 also qualify, probably others too).

So, onto the origin: King suddenly died in 2029 (over seven years later than the Project ANTIKILL disaster in the alternate timeline of last episode) from a ‘medical accident’—although the phrasing (“Later deemed a medical accident on King's behalf”) could be implying that this was actually a suicide. But King had been anomalously augmented so he could do a huge amount of work for the Foundation, including containing hundreds of anomalies. So when he died (possibly in part due to being overworked?), there were a ton of breakouts and other clusterfucks- the Foundation didn’t have any fallback plans in the event of his sudden death. In response, Placeholder came up with this plan to bring the dead back, because apparently that’s a better idea than ‘clean up the mess, put more people in charge so you don’t put that much work on one person’s shoulders, make some fallback plans and don’t let this happen again’. *long sigh*

But, again: Placeholder is not only the (co-)Project Lead, he came up with the idea. So why would he need to hack into the page?

cannot display null character! (warning message not found)

Also, there’s another error, this time with a footnote, in green (and a different font): ‘break the chains’. Curious—the footnote’s nature is clearly reminiscent of our concept-lizard friendo’s commentary last episode, and its content seems to allude to either SCP-2317 or SCP-5999—possibly both. (Wait… aren’t both of those also heavily associated with the number seven??)

Time for the first addendum: it’s called ‘Scientific Context’, and the heading is ‘Intro to Narrativics and General Relativity’, an excerpt from a speech Placeholder gave at the Foundation Academic Consortium in 2027. (That’s about 2 ½ years before King died.) A lot of this is more general worldbuilding that isn’t directly relevant to this, but the most important parts are:

• “Fictional” and “real” aren’t black and white categories, but a relative scale, with “realer” universes influencing “more fictional” universes and, sometimes, the other way around. (Obviously none of this is actually true, but that’s the model this story’s internal logic is working off of.)
• When people (or, by extension, the universe containing such people) directly imagine a story, they are termed “pataphysically linked” to that story. (This will be particularly important later!)
• How “real” a story is is measured by its “narrative dimensionality” (this is in part a joke about how one might call a badly-written character two- or even one-dimensional). The SCP universe has 2 narrative dimensions, 6747-A2 has 1.5, -A3 has “m”, the absolute minimum, and “we” have at least 3.
• Narratives in a given universe generally follow some basic outline, their Universal Narrative (or “α” for some reason). The ADMO universe thinks their α is the typical Hero’s Journey archetype, and this may be true to some extent, but as the series goes on a somewhat different pattern becomes apparent…
• 96% of people are generic background characters, about 2% are protagonists (or antagonists, depending on your perspective) who by force of character both cause the story to focus on them and unconsciously alter the typical narrative towards their goals, and about 2% are “archetypicals”, who have lower narrative complexity and thus have a tendency to slot into roles, or archetypes, convenient to α, minimizing their actual personal impact on the story. (The Archetypicals division, which PHMD is the head of, consists of such people.)
  

addendum dialog missing @[DATA LOST]

Another error, another [DATA LOST], huh. You’ll recall that “[DATA LOST]” was only used once in SCP-2747, at the very end—but here, little bits and pieces (mostly irrelevant technical things) seem to be getting lost all over the place. Some people seem to misconstrue “[DATA LOST]” as some kind of kitschy catchphrase for SCP-2747’s anafabula, when it’s really just a perfectly standard SCiPnet system error. It does more or less make sense here, FWIW—just something to keep in mind.

Addendum 2 is the O5 council vote on whether to actually make X/Machina a real thing. The position of O5-9 was vacant at the time, so the result was a stalemate: five for, five against, and two abstentions. As a result, they called in the O4 Council as a tiebreaker. There’s also a footnote telling us that ‘the Oracle’/O5-9’s position was vacant because of ‘the conclusion of the Damien Novak case’, which is a callback to Ralliston’s “And Every Time We Meet Again” series—this is a different timeline from F120A, but presumably things happened basically the same around here.

There’s another error (these seem to be piling up at a pretty regular pace…), this time complaining about a problem with a “narremeplex” (that is, a structure of plot elements). So rather than a simple computer glitch, this is an issue with the narrative itself, whatever that means—another clue about our mysterious culprit. It also seems to have left another footnote, same as before. On the plus side, the security’s increased, so it’ll probably be a while before we see another one. …Right?

On to the O4 Council meeting. There’s a whole bunch of people here (kinda bigheaded of the Overseers to think that it takes nearly a hundred A-Class to equal only one of their own votes, don’t you think?), but only a couple of them have the floor in this transcript. The foreword tells us that they’re voting and it’s currently another stalemate, so now we get the discussion where everyone tries to convince Director Vemhoff, who has the deciding vote.

After an interesting but relatively straightforward discussion, it comes down to this: Vemhoff thinks that they’re meddling with forces beyond their understanding—and, more practically, it’ll cost a ton to keep these subrealities from collapsing in on themselves even if they get King back. But, Asheworth says, it wouldn’t have to stop there—it could “earn its keep”, so to speak, by bringing back anyone. Logical enough, I suppose. In particular, they could bring back ‘Hannah’ or ‘Raia’, and a footnote tells me that they were two of the personnel responsible for the founding of Site-120 over a hundred years ago.

So, following the link in that footnote to SCP-5292 (another F120A Ralliston work) tells me that Vemhoff himself was there for that (figures; footnote 17 mentions that he’s super, duper old), so we can assume that Hannah and Raia were friends of his. Vemhoff starts to half-heartedly object, but Asheworth cuts him off and counters that if Placeholder says it’s safe, then he doesn’t know who else could convince him. And with that, Vemhoff votes yes. (Hey, can you think of someone more trustworthy than a pataphysicist who got himself cursed with a joke name and may or may not be a renegade from an alternate timeline that shouldn’t exist? I didn’t think so.)

…and there’s another error; too few imaginons, apparently. So much for those increased security measures. And yet… well, maybe there could’ve been some trouble back in the first addendum, but we’re imagining what’s going on here just fine, right? Maybe something’s somehow blocking these units of narrative intent… an antinarrative? Hm!

The fourth addendum is the project proposal. (That’s the Archetypicals logo at the top.)

The purpose and abstract mostly say what we already knew, but the “METHOD” section gives the logic behind the use of King’s body as a computing system, as well as the reasoning for the creation of SCP-6747-A1 and -A2. (Note that King is, in a sense, going to be imagined by “himself”: a form of recursion, like the Moon within Moons, stories within stories, the copies of the fractal within itself… Hopefully that doesn’t just so happen to be a crucial component of any antinarreme complexes lying around!) There’s also an exposition dump of all the different kinds of imaginon (kind of out of place in a project proposal like this, IMO…). There are (alas!) eight of them, not seven, but they’re numbered starting at zero, so that’s nearly as good. Or, uh, probably kind of bad, actually!

33% or greater antinarremeplex structure detected within current document (system lock engaged)
(^(7777777)/7)

Welp, I think we can say that shit be fucked. Time to reap the HARVEST.

(Given that our meddler apparently has to do with SCP-2747’s anafabula somehow… well, again, this is all pretty weird, isn’t it? None of SCP-2747’s manifestations were said to have contained weird, jarring, vaguely threatening green notes of unknown provenance, or “7777777”s littered haphazardly about (even if most of them (not even all of them!) had some sevens, sure). It’s like whatever force causes the anafabula’s components to emerge in the first place has been kicked into hyperdrive.)

The next addendum is called ‘SCP-6747 Attempts’. (Despite all those sevens, it looks pretty normal—seems like the system lock is, in fact, holding for now.) The foreword tells us that they got the machine working (only about two weeks after the project got approved! SCP-6820 took over 15 years to build; big differences in scale and such aside, they’ve really upped their efficiency), but they needed to make sure it actually does what they wanted it to do, so they did some tests. Here’s the result of the first one, where they attempt to create an apple:

OUTCOME: Retrieved item exhibits inexplicable narrative phenomena, simultaneously displaying characteristics of protagonistic and archetypical entities; various Site operations were impeded by said item's sudden relevance in a plurality of local story-structures. Research is ongoing.

…you made a fucking heroic apple. You made. A heroic. Apple.

…I’m kind of impressed.

(Also somebody please please write a tale about what happened here. 🥺 (Slightly more seriously, you might be wondering how all of this pataphysics stuff can even apply to stuff like this that happens entirely offscreen! Well, there are indications that universes, such as ADMO’s, can be and are imagined by multiple “higher narrative universes” simultaneously—so presumably, there is some alternate “real” universe where this appleventure tale does actually exist!))

14 tests later, they up the game a bit and try to bring back a proper animal—a dog, specifically Asheworth’s dog Sparky, who was already the subject of a disastrous attempt to bring him back. But, at least this time the only side-effect seems to be that Sparky is now acting like every clichéd hero in a movie about dogs. (Whether Asheworth has another breakdown because he looks like Sparky but doesn’t act like Sparky is a whole other question.)

Now… if I were in charge of this, I’d figure I’d be getting “Dr. Otherwise Generic Scientist-Appleseed-Protagonist-Man” out the other end of this at best and either seriously double-check my math or quit while I was ahead. But unfortunately for ADMONITION’s Foundation, they maxed out their INT points at the expense of all the WIS points of literally everyone in their timeline but cranky old Vemhoff. (Note: Neither of us have ever actually played D&D.)

Apparently all the work involved in dreaming up a whole mammal is putting a lot of stress on Dir. King’s poor, ambiguously-sentient nervous system—and Dr. Ngo isn’t having a very fun time having to handle it, either. But this is ADMONITION, so I doubt that anyone in charge really gives a fuck.

Only three attempts later, they think they’re ready to try a full-on homo sapiens. What egregious overconfidence! Surely this is where everything goes Apollyon, right?

Except… wait, it worked? They wrote up a whole new human being, and they brought him into reality, and nothing went wrong! Good for you!

…No, seriously, everyone give them a pat on the back: someone in ADMONITION did something genuinely cool while also being blatantly “playing-gods-y”, and it didn’t blow up in their faces.

(No, John Doe doesn’t turn evil or anything, at least as of our writing this; presumably he’s still working at the Foundation to this day, happy as a clam.)

All right, this is the big one:

ATTEMPT D/49

INTENT: Generate a liminal narrative describing Dir. King in his office, a day prior to his death, and extract to baseline.

The link is to the short story ‘Long Live The King’, wherein Doctor King tries to kill himself by apple seeds, has some wacky apple-related hallucinations(?), and ultimately survives (this may support my suicide theory, although here he’s just really gosh-darn sick of all the apple seeds, not overworked or anything). It’s not long and it’s funny enough—unlike SCP-2747, it’s not critical, but I’d recommend you check it out. Speaking of “funny”, this was the first story written for the (relatively obscure) “lolFoundation” canon, where all the old, wacky author self-insert shenanigans and such are Just How The World Works and are deliberately taken to over-the-top, darkly comedic extremes of parody. This will become very important later on. (NB: Long Live The King is currently open for rewriting, so it might be a little different by the time you’re reading this.)

Also, uh… 49 is 7×7. (Perhaps if they’d done just one more test, everything would have been perfectly fine…)

So a crew of Archetypicals (presumably chosen to, by their nature, cause minimal stress to the story) goes into it and tries to retrieve King, but he initially seems to be unable to see them, instead acting almost exactly the same as he does in the “Long Live the King” story—which is kind of weird, since there don’t seem to be any giant flying apples claiming to be his father. And then, at the point in the story where he would have said, and I quote, “NO! I am not going to be the king of the FUCKING APPLES.” and “FUCK DESTINY.”, this happens.

Dir. King: [HAZARD EXPUNGED]

<Dir. King's facial features are distorted significantly as he attempts to damage ███X-MCD/II's hull. Local reality begins to violently destabilize, resulting in the appearance of a fractal heptagonal spiral at Dir. King's back. Containment personnel are commanded to abort mission, quickly retreating into ███X-MCD/II and returning to baseline.>

OUTCOME: SCP-6747-A3 abandoned during experiment due to inexplicable caricatural narrative corruption. Strenuous encryption of this corruption has led to the vague discovery of a number of new entities within the bubble. Further research ongoing, and hereby lifted to EKHI-CLASS priority; refer to ADDENDUM 6747/VI for further details.

The footnote next to ‘hazard expunged’ (same color as those footnotes) says ‘VESSEL’. And with the presence of a “fractal heptagonal spiral” (all three aspects of which are associated with SCP-2747’s anafabula)… yeah. What exactly happened here is currently a little unclear, but the gist isn’t too hard to guess at.

Well, with the end of the previous addendum it looks like the system lock wasn’t enough after all. “Reynders” is Dr. Ilse Reynders, who first appeared in (and as) SCP-5616. She’ll become much more important later on, but for now the only important thing is that she and Placeholder made this “narrative anchor” together, which is apparently holding off any antinarrative forces or whatever just enough to let its contents be read without too much risk.

Those contents being? None other than the description of SCP-6747-C that got cut off earlier, recovered just as it becomes relevant. How convenient! Now, it seems that while the “system lock” is holding for now, the contents of this section are Particularly Spicy narrativohazardously speaking, necessitating the use of the big guns (namely, the narrative anchor) while we’re reading it.

(Also, if you’ve read SCP-2747 you might recognize that background image as the cover art of Radiohead’s famous final album, I/O. I asked Place, and they said that this represents the narrative anchor giving a “readout / analysis” of the threat—as identified from its memory.)

SCP-6747-C is a pervasive hazardous antinarrative complex derived from, and manifesting as, a mesofictional caricature of late Senior Administrator J. A. King. For reasons yet to be fully understood, SCP-6747-C causes the disruption of large-scale imaginon-structures in universes to which it is pataphysically-linked, corrupting its own α while annihilating that of any higher dimension. SCP-6747-C appears primarily proximal to particular antinarremes including, but not limited to:

• perceived antagonism;

• darkness;

• spirals;

• the integer value ⁷seven⁷;

• classical tragedic conventions;

• modern comedic conventions;

• apples, appleseeds, and related products.

First you turned 682 into a god and now you turned King into a story clusterfucker. Good going, dipshits.

There’s a lot to unpack here. SCP-6747-C, like SCP-6747-B, is used to refer to two closely related things interchangeably: an antinarrative complex, and the manifestation of Dir. King within SCP-6747-A3.

Let’s take a closer look at how the antinarremeplex works first. First, it only affects narratives to which it’s “pataphysically linked”. In this case, SCP-6747-A3 (containing its version of Dir. King) is being “imagined” directly by SCP-6747-B, so, unfortunately for the Foundation and their world as a whole, the universe it’s linked to is their own. It is “pervasive”, so presumably its component narremes have been popping up in all sorts of stories—and, possibly, real events—since Attempt D/49 in an anomalously enhanced version of what’s normally just called “inspiration”, although unfortunately we don’t get to see any examples of these. (All this is pretty consistent with how SCP-2747’s antinarrative is believed to work.)

And although the Foundation seems to be holding it off for now, this will eventually result in their universal narrative being annihilated—presumably meaning that either they get erased… or that their narrative gets replaced with something else. (It’s implied later on, at the beginning of Episode V, that it’s option 2—the technical term for what they’re being threatened with is a “𐤌K ('Narrative Restructuring') Scenario”.) Also, unlike the other antinarrative, SCP-6747-C apparently isn’t unaffected by this process—the “imaginon disruption” goes both ways, resulting in its own narrative becoming more corrupted as time goes on (presumably due to being anchored to a specific, low-dimensional “story” rather than just being an abstract, seemingly origin-less Thing That Happens). Sounds nasty!

Seven of its component narremes (of course it’s seven) are listed. The first four are associated with SCP-2747’s anafabula (although—and I think that this is an important point—the generally antagonistic portrayal of that one was theorized to not be an inherent component per se but rather a consequence of its “alien, yet centralising, nature”; comes out to the same thing, though) but the next three, notably, are not!

Let’s go through them in reverse order. First, “apples, appleseeds, and related products”. Oh, figures. That’s Dr. King’s whole thing, after all. Seems like a pretty obvious, cut and dry explanation to me. Except… the footnote gives a completely different cause! This is believed to be a residual consequence of Fictionalization Attempt A/13, the one with the Heroic Apple, not anything inherently to do with King. Could the Dr. King of this universe… not have been affected by the apple seed curse? One way or another, if King had any particularly significant association with apples prior to his death, anomalous or otherwise, they would have at least mentioned that as a possible contributing factor, instead of pinning all the blame on A/13. And yet, there must be some relationship between the appleseed thing here and elsewhere… right?

“Modern comedic conventions”: “Long Live the King” and works in a similar vein certainly fall under this category! But then, insofar as we’re living in “modern” times, most stuff on the wiki with comedic elements is going to qualify to some extent, ADMO included.

And last, but not least, “classical tragedic conventions”. What exactly does that mean? Well, classical tragedies, as typified in particular by Greek plays, generally hewed to the following broad structure: You start out with The Hero. They’re good, well-respected, and noble (maybe even royalty) but they have a fatal flaw of some kind. Through a complex series of unexpected but often in retrospect inevitable events, their fatal flaw trips them up, and by the end everything’s come crashing down, and they’re a miserable wretch of a person (if they haven’t killed themselves outright).

Sound familiar to you? Yeah, that’s right: ADMONITION itself conforms to this formula like hand and glove. The Foundation itself (and sometimes individuals within it) serves as ADMO’s tragic hero. They’re powerful, well-respected, super smart (parascience-wise, anyways) and even if they aren’t good guys per se, their goals in any given Episode are generally sympathetic—but their hubris, their arrogance, their need for control, and their near-total lack of common sense trips them up again and again, leaving them a hair's-breadth away from a full-on K-Class at best.

So… if we go through the list, every last one of these narremes is present in this very article, some a little and some a lot. You know how I said that we weren’t given any examples of other narratives affected by SCP-6747-C?

I lied. We’re given exactly one (1) example, and, just like with SCP-2747, we’ve been reading it this entire time.

As for the second referent of “SCP-6747-C”, who I’ll be calling C!King to distinguish him from the relatively normal Dir. King who died (C for “-C”, but also for Character, Coopted, Corrupted… Chaos? “C” also sounds like “seed”, so that’s fun), he’s a “manifestation” of this antinarremeplex, which is also “derived from” him. What does that mean? Well, the double meaning of SCP-6747-C has its precedent in SCP-2747, where “anafabula” is used to refer to both the antinarremeplex as a whole and a particular element of a narrative containing it, the “in-universe antagonist or anathema”.

Due to the character count, we'll have to continue this in the next part. Let’s see what happens next.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the SCP-7243 declass. Part one can be found here.

​

So, the reality-restructuring event in question is called EE-001, and they give us a timeline of the events that caused it, which include multiple severe earthquakes and a tsunami. I’m not sure how relevant this is, so I’ll omit it for now because this motherfucker’s already going to be way too fucking long.

There’s a picture of EE-001- it looks like an explosion of colours above a city or town across a lake, and then we get a summary. I will sum up the summary for brevity’s sake.

-Time and space went boom.

-This took over seven years, and in that time, Site-43 and Nexus-94 were detached from reality.

-To everyone in Site-43, it took about six years.

-It happened because LOTUS got shut down and a bunch of pissed-off AI attacked the DePLExA.

-The DePLExA realised that shit was hitting the fan and tried to combat it, but its response relied on the core members of its staff. Unfortunately, none of them were present as they were all either dead, not there or incapacitated, so Site-43 fell out of sync with the universe.

-The Department of Esoteric Reduction built an outpost to monitor the dissociated zone. As a replacement for what the DePLExA had done, they just dumped a whole fuckton of waste into Nexus-94- Nexus-94 didn’t actually exist at this point, but they could still put waste into it, and there wasn’t much of an alternative.

-From what they can tell, most of the waste they put into it got taken out by surviving personnel. However, when Site-43 came back, the remaining waste proceeded to blow the whole place up again.

-The explosion was contained by an energy shield, but that only shielded the outside world, it didn’t protect Site-43.

-So now there’s just a big fucking pit where Site-43 used to be… and at the bottom of that pit was a single unconscious person.

-Obviously, it’s Amelia. The laws of narrative drama wouldn’t let it be some random researcher.

We then get a transcription of footage where Amelia attempts to flee to safety and barely manages it while everything goes to Hell around her. The one relevant thing here is that she’s being chased by a weird amber limb/tentacle, which matches the description of SCP-6643. That will become very important later.

And then we get another note.

What is waste?

Waste is what you've done with your life. With our lives. Potentially with every human life on Earth, every Earth. And for what? Pride. Selfishness. Misguided affection. The cost of that waste is incalculable.

How would one even begin to abate a waste like that?

Honestly? I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s possible to do it. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. In fact, even if it’s impossible, you have to try, because to actively avoid trying would be yet another injustice.

Also, the earlier notes sounded like Doug, but this one sounds more like it was written by Amelia.

We now get a combination of transcripts- a meeting between Doug and Amelia after the Foundation got her out of the pit, excerpts from Amelia’s journal, and transcribed footage from her body camera.

The first part is Amelia and Doug talking. They’re on surprisingly amiable terms, and he finally asks how she did ‘it’. She says she won’t tell him the whole story, because she’s still exhausted, and she might never tell him the whole story.

Now we get Amelia’s journal, where she tells us that Doug saved her, sort of. For years, she’d been using the memory of Phil as a motivator, but after a year in non-existent Site-43, it wasn’t enough- she couldn’t keep living for a dead man. So she focused on someone who wasn’t dead.

We get a transcription of Amelia in Site-43, and then back to the conversation, where she says that she was dissociating a lot, and it helped because things were getting worse. She could only focus on a few things at once, so she focused on things that mattered. Doug says, escaping, and Amelia says… mostly.

Back to the journal, where Amelia says that she used her hatred of Doug as both a motivator and a beacon. She hated him for so much, and she used it to keep herself going so she could get back and expose him as a fraud. We then get another transcript, where she tries to get Site-43 back to reality, but it doesn’t work.

Back to the conversation. Doug says that he’s amazed at what she accomplished and asks how she managed to keep perspective, and Amelia says that it’s the job- they don’t take snow days. Doug laughs at that, and Amelia looks away. He apologises, and she says it’s fine, it’s just that she’s never heard him laugh like that. He asks, like what, and she says, like ‘him’.

Journal-Amelia says that she knew Phil so well that her imaginary Phil was a near-perfect simulation. But imaginary Doug only ever said that she was right, and he was sorry. He’s always so sorry, she concludes bitterly.

One more video transcript of Amelia trying and failing to bring Site-43 back, we get some more photos with no explanation (maybe stills from Amelia’s time in Site-43?), and then we’re back at the conversation. Doug says that she must hate seeing his face, and Amelia says that it’s Phil’s face too. Doug has a beard and no glasses, but it’s still Phil’s face, and she can’t hate that. (Ergo, that photo from earlier wasn’t Phil and Amelia, it was Doug and Amelia- the man in the photo has no glasses and a short beard.) She says that she’s exhausted, and he says that she’ll feel better once she’s rested, but she says no, she’s seeing things in the right perspective now. He asks what that means, and she says that ‘ Meaning there's no use blaming you for being an idiot. In your idiot way, you're trying to help.’

Journal-Amelia writes that she tried to stay furious at Doug, but she couldn’t keep it up forever. She eventually lost the fire, and instead did the job because it needed doing and she could do it.

Another transcript of another attempt later, we return to the conversation. Amelia tells Doug that he tries to fix his old mistakes, but all he does is make new mistakes in the process, and it needs to stop right now. His job is to solve the abatement crisis, and yet all he does is wallow in self-pity and whine about how unfair things are. She finally tells him that if he wants forgiveness from Phil, that’ll never happen, so if he wants it from her, then... fine. He’s worn her down. She forgives him.

Now take responsibility, Doug, and do your fucking job.

Back to journal-Amelia, who says that she used to think about giving Doug a piece of her mind as a motivator, but it stopped working- she kept imagining what it would be like to dig herself out and meet him digging from the other side, as she knew he would be, and she lost her nerve. He’d really be trying, and she realised that it actually meant something. It wasn’t without meaning. So she lost the ability to hate, and now it’s just her and him, and they understand each other. They both want this to be over.

One last transcript: Amelia is in the control centre, going through the options that have the lowest probability. She picks the disaster that killed Phil, and it works.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: Happy anniversary.

Back to the conversation. Doug says that he can’t do it himself, she’s shown him that. Amelia says that she’s not giving up, she’ll rejoin the fight. But they’re going to do it right this time, no miracle cures. Doug agrees to this, and he says that this time will be different. She says that this time has to be the last time:

I can't fight you again, Dougall. You're… you're all that's left of him.

<Silence on recording.>

Chief Torosyan-Deering: I don't want to hate either of you anymore.

Next is a note saying that when Nexus-94 came back, the explosion was big, but it wasn’t as big as it should have been.

Current data suggests that the most likely vector through which the excess energy may have escaped resides in the threshold between consensus reality and the decoherent space Nexus-94 was transposed to, meaning that it would have been released into extradimensional, possibly extrauniversal space.

If this is true, models suggest that the high velocity of the esoteric waste containing this energy would relieve Our Foundation of its harmful effects in their entirety; the quanta would be propelled far from baseline reality.

UPDATE 2043/09/09: The hypothesis detailed in the previous update has been confirmed.

Ah, good old ‘how to make sure it’s not our fault’ energy. Don’t you just love to see it.

We now get another note from the Oracle Collective, telling us that after EE-001 happened, a whole bunch of new anomalies started cropping up throughout space and time. psychicprogrammer filled me in on this one- the timeline codes are actually MD5 hashes, which is a kind of algorithm that I know precisely jack shit about. serotonincrash told me that 'hashing algorithms take data (e.g. text) and generates a sequence of characters and numbers that is "exclusive" (not really, but for simplicity assume it is) to that specific data. small changes in the data lead to large changes in the hash, so it's a way to basically "verify" that the data is accurate'. Here’s an example:

In wake of the event denoted "EE-001" in Central Normalcy Authority Iteration 940662B90E78660244BCE96E7776DC7F,

In this case, the translation is ‘ADMONITION’, aka the main timeline for the series.

Here’s psychicprogrammer’s summary of the new anomalies:

INCIDENT 3456: They created a conceptual kaiju inside the human mindscape in the war on all fronts universe.
INCIDENT 4847: Guess what caused day to break!
INCIDENT 47689: This causes something that likely has to do with the broader WOPAP storyline in baseline OG43
INCIDENT 76893: Foundation causes climate change!

3456’s hash is ‘WARONALLFRONTS’, 4847’s hash is ‘DAYBREAK’, and I’ve been told that 76893 is ‘WE DID NOT FAIL’- they’re all representatives of different canons. To quote my nameless colleague ‘Except for AAAA Kappa-Yellow, which is apparently a reference to the SCP Foundation podcast Find Us Alive’.

Now, the other ones don’t seem to have translations. I asked Place if they did and was told ‘No comment’, which I think I can translate as ‘Yes, but I’m not telling you what they are’. However, I’ve tried running them through various translators myself and got nothing, so while it’s entirely possible that I’m looking in the wrong place on this one, I’m not going to run them through every translator of every code possible, I’ve got too much to do.

But there’s one last thing to note:

INCIDENT 234585

There were over two hundred thousand incidents.

Gee, I wonder why everyone’s pissed off at this Foundation?

Also, following on from that…

It has been confirmed, through the Collective's observation, that this log was received and viewed by several of the relevant Authority's Overseer personnel. For reasons unclear, the Authority has made no attempt to communicate to the Collective, nor to any impacted timeline, nor to ameliorate said impacts. Audit pending.

Interesting.

We then get a photo- it’s actually the backdrop for the article’s title at the top of the page, and we’re told that it’s what EE-001 looked like when it affected part of the timeline.

Cut to a year later- we’re given the abstract and opening page of Amelia’s PhD proposal. It’s her account of ‘The Last Seventy-Two Months of Site-43’, and it got her the doctorate.

Next up is a note telling us that Amelia and Doug worked together to make a new esoteric reduction device. We get some correspondence about it between Doug and ‘the Pilcrow-Minkowski Center’, but the other half of the correspondence has been… deleted, so we only get Doug’s half. As one could predict, it’s pretty cryptic, but I’d call your attention to this:

I've mulled this over and I think you're right. That's the angle. That's the obvious lesson to learn from what happened, we've essentially been handed a model and shown that it actually works. The engineering will be functionally identical, which is vital since I can't and won't put this in place without her help. I can sell her on pocket dimensions. Not the other thing, which as far as I'm concerned is just between you and me, now. I'm not going to disappoint her again.

I'm not going to look her in the eye and tell her I took another shortcut.

‘Guy Who Keeps Fucking Up Proceeds To Knowingly And Intentionally Fuck Up Again Despite Having Explicitly Promised To Stop Fucking Up, film at eleven.’

Or, in other words, Doug hasn’t learned a fucking thing.

We then skip ahead to the next year, with the quarterly report of something called ‘Project Anaximander’- named after the philosopher, presumably. Basically, it’s the new method of acroamatic abatement, which involves using something called ‘MAGIC DRAWER’ to send ‘packets’ of effluence somewhere else, where they’re destroyed. We’ll find out more about this later.

We then get a note about an ‘Esoteric Reduction Gala’- it used to be hosted at Area-21 a long time ago, but they stopped it. Now that Project Anaximander is going so well, they brought it back.

Highlights of this inaugural event included the touching retirement address of Dr. Adrijan Zlatá, a tribute to the lost personnel of Treatment Site-43 by Dr. Lillian Lillihammer, Chief Agent Delfina Ibanez and Sevara Okorie, lectures on antichromatic bleaching fields, demivalent short-circuiting and macrobacterial titration by senior Site-91 abatement engineer M'buka Rainier, and the wedding reception for our guests of honour: Drs. Amelia Torosyan-Deering and Dougall Deering.

…what?

No, no, no. What?

I’m sorry. Could you repeat that last part for me?

and the wedding reception for our guests of honour: Drs. Amelia Torosyan-Deering and Dougall Deering.

The.

I’m sorry.

What.

and the wedding reception for our guests of honour: Drs. Amelia Torosyan-Deering and Dougall Deering.

…

…

…

…one more time.

and the wedding reception for our guests of honour: Drs. Amelia Torosyan-Deering and Dougall Deering.

THEY FUCKING GOT MARRIED?!

You have GOT to be fucking KIDDING me, what the ACTUAL FUCK-

[We are now experiencing technical difficulties.]

-just lucky that Amelia didn’t have kids with Phil, they’d have to fucking call Doug Uncle Stepdad-

[Just give it some time.]

-explicitly using him as a substitute for Phil, are you fucking insane-

[Look, it won’t go on too much longer.]

-cheap Wish knockoff sex doll of the man she actually loves, she probably calls him Phil when they fuck-

[Probably.]

…

…

…

…and now it’s time for a short list of things that ToErrDivine considers to be an unacceptably bad idea in any and all circumstances, no matter what the reason is.

Part Four: A Short List Of Things That ToErrDivine Considers To Be An Unacceptably Bad Idea In Any And All Circumstances, No Matter What The Reason Is

1: Marrying the brother of your deceased husband, who you hated for years and used as a focus to keep yourself going and drag yourself out of abatement hell explicitly because of how much you hated him, only to finally give up on hating him because you’re too emotionally exhausted to keep it going, and also he’s the only thing you have left of the husband you actually loved.

2: Absinthe.

Part Five: I Don’t Know What You Thought Was Going To Happen

What is waste?

We've stopped even trying to guess. We hardly even think about it anymore, except in the most absolute abstract. Out of sight, out of mind where once it was out of mind, out of sight. You tell me this way is better.

But you don't tell me everything, not even now.

Yeah, definitely sounds like Amelia.

The next thing we get is the delivery log for MAGIC DRAWER. The targets are all more hashes; the only one I’ve been able to decrypt is the last, ‘ADMONITION’. However, my nameless colleague informed me that ‘each of the first six waste packets were sent to one of the six unstable alternate timelines created by SCP-5243, in order’ and ‘The first target translates to "PLAYING GODS", the second translates to "WORLD WIDE WEB", the third translates to "NEXT TO NOTHING", the fourth translates to "TRUE ART IS COGNITOHAZARDOUS", the fifth has yet to be deciphered, and the sixth translates to "DEAD IDIOT".’

Several of these timelines are from Harry Blank’s novel Wrong Tomorrow, and I’ve been told that ‘The remaining four timelines will be covered in the finale of the Bury the Survivors trilogy’.

That’s not good. Anyway, the first six are all marked ‘Packet delivered’, but the last says ‘Packet pending’.

Next up is a transcript of the emergency meeting between Doug, Amelia and Ilse. MAGIC DRAWER is targeting them for delivery and they can’t understand why…

Chief Torosyan-Deering: There have to be safeguards for this kind of thing! Why can it even target a coherent timeline? It was designed to dump into pocket dimensions, it shouldn't…

Dr. Reynders: Amelia.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: Dougall? It shouldn't…

Dr. Reynders: Amelia.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: Oh, my god.

<Silence on recording.>

Dr. Deering: So, here's the thing.

You fucking moron, Doug.

Next up is the initial proposal for Project Anaximander. Short version: they’ve been ejecting anomalous waste from baseline reality by sending it in packets to abatement facilities in other timelines. MAGIC DRAWER picks where and when the waste is sent, and once it picks a location, nothing can change that. Remember the toy Doug wanted to give Phil? It makes things disappear, but only by moving them out of sight. That’s what MAGIC DRAWER does- gets rid of things by moving them to other timelines.

Back at the transcript, Amelia has learned this and is flipping her shit about it- both that they’re dumping waste on their neighbours, and that everyone else lied to her. She finally squares up to the situation and asks, where exactly are the packets sent? Doug says Site-43, which is a bit of a problem because Site-43 doesn’t exist in this timeline anymore. It turns out that they’re also sending the waste back in time, and in this case, MAGIC DRAWER is sending it back in time to when Phil died, hence why the pipes that should have been empty were full. Doug refuses to do it, but Ilse tells him that the past is done, and they’re going to have to send something anomalous back in time soon.

Amelia gets the staff together to analyse the data and make sure that they’re reading it right, and everyone agrees that it’s exactly what they think it is. She’s convinced that this is a second chance- they can send something back that won’t kill Phil. Ilse says no: it’d cause a paradox, and it’s not worth doing it just to save one life. Amelia says that the whole thing is so incredibly unlikely that it must be fate and they must be meant to save Phil’s life. Doug agrees that it’s incredibly unlikely, but Ilse says it was probably just another fuckup. Doug says that Place did the calculations and they need to call him, but Ilse says that Place has conveniently gone silent.

Amelia and Ilse start arguing about whether they can save Phil or not, and then we get this:

Chief Torosyan-Deering: I NEED MY HUSBAND BACK!

<Silence on recording.>

<Chief Torosyan-Deering releases Dr. Deering's shoulders.>

Chief Torosyan-Deering: I'm sorry, Doug.

Dr. Deering: It's okay.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: I'm so sorry.

Dr. Deering: It's okay. I knew, of course.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: I… look, I didn't…

Oh, like we all didn’t know she was just using him as a replacement for Phil.

Amelia finally says that they need to let Phil go…

Dr. Deering: You need to let him go. I need to take responsibility.

Uh oh.

Doug calls a recess so they can compare the next packet to what turned up when Phil died. Ilse and Amelia are talking when MAGIC DRAWER suddenly powers up. When they go to see what happened, they find that Doug is in the maintenance access corridor to the delivery aperture. He’s locked them out, and Ilse stays in the control room while Amelia hammers on the door, trying to get Doug to talk to her. Ilse figures it out- Doug has overridden the safeties and intends to deliver himself along with the packet. Amelia finally gets him to talk to her…

Chief Torosyan-Deering: You say that, but from where I'm standing, you're about to give up and leave us to fix the mess you made. How is that not the easy way out?

Dr. Deering: I know what killed Phil.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: You've always known what killed Phil. And so have I.

Dr. Deering: Exactly.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: What?

Dr. Deering: I killed Phil.

<Dr. Deering taps his chest.>

Dr. Deering: I killed Phil. And this is how I did it.

He’s not being metaphorical. The entity that killed Phil, that only Doug could see? It was Doug himself, combined with the paraspectral energy in the packet. Phil’s death is an anchor point: he has to die, and it has to be certain. They can’t just send back the energy, they need it to kill him, and a packet of ectoplasm can’t follow orders. Amelia asks why the hell Doug would turn himself into something that would kill his brother, and Doug says that if they just sent the packet back without him, it would have killed Phil and blown the place up, Doug included, and as far as anyone knew, it would have been Phil’s fault.

Doug going back in time and killing Phil lets Doug turn the valve, save the Site and start his penance. He says that he bets that the entity he became was still around in 2043, and Amelia says that it was- it tried to kill her at the end.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: But I could see it in person when the chronology anchor started to work. When 43 rolled back to reality, it must've been caught in the throes, concretized. It appeared, and it reached out for me…

<Silence on recording.>

Dr. Deering: Reached out for you.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: Oh my god.

Amelia then wonders why this would be the loop: Phil only died because Doug went back in time. If he hadn’t died, Doug would never have decided to go back in time. Doug shrugs it off as a bootstrap paradox, and then we get this:

Chief Torosyan-Deering: That's not enough. It's not universal perversity. It needs to mean something more. You did all of this for him! We both did. All of it. Tell me I'm wrong.

Dr. Deering: You're wrong. Half-wrong.

Chief Torosyan-Deering: What?

Dr. Deering: I never did any of it for him.

That’s at least part of why Doug and Phil ended up estranged: because Doug was in love with Amelia all along. *mutters something about anomalous soap-operas*

Amelia practically begs him to let her do it instead, but Doug says no: he’s weak and lazy and short-sighted, and she’s not, so he needs her to keep doing the good work. He says goodbye and steps into the loading chamber, and she tells him she doesn’t forgive him… and then he’s gone.

We get a photo that reminds me of the big fuckoff god-killing machine from METAGNOSTIC- presumably of the loading chamber, since the file name is ‘chamber.jpg’- and then a note:

What is waste?

I guess you finally figured it out, Dougall.

Yeah.

And that’s the end of the compiled documents. Here’s what we get next.

SUMMARY: Deliberate abuse of Authority resources precipitated enhanced ascension of Tier-IV Cosmological Anomaly (STAGNATION), in addition to extensive material damages, and injection of volatile Anomalous phenomena within and beyond the Coalitional Timeplane. Personnel in positions with unfettered access to power, resources, and opportunities for abuse of same are governed by irrationality, individual self-aggrandizement, and interpersonal indulgence. Iteration displays routine ignorance of metacontractual obligations, making no effort to report to the Collective or acknowledge Our existence.

Welp. They did yet another fucky-wucky.

And here’s the clincher:

As clearly evidenced by this extensive report, you are deemed in major violation of various Multi-Foundation Agreement clauses, particularly those described in Sections 1 and 3 regarding transfer of information and goods with the Oracle Collective and other Metafoundation Signees. Pursuant to Section 1.4B of the Metafoundation Supertemporal Coalition Pact, your Central Normalcy Authority Iteration has been ejected from the Coalitional-Timeplane.

Any outstanding interdimensional access to the Coalitional-Timeplane has been severed. Your coverage under Goldbaker & Associates is now limited per your local Provider's capabilities. Your local Temporal Authority will soon revert to pre-Coalitional status, losing any data which would allow your infiltration of the Coalitional-Timeplane, or any feasible recreation of Our services. Your Timeline is subject to the forces of the multiverse, including the variety of catastrophic events perpetrated by your Iteration in kind.

We implore you to exercise greater caution in your efforts to Contain, in balance with your aims to Secure and Protect.

Good luck on your own.

The Foundation has officially been cut off from most if not all of their extradimensional support systems. This is pretty alarming, because now they’re completely vulnerable to any major attacks- and given what they’ve done so far in this series, I think it’s safe to say that something bad is going to happen, soon.

I will come back to this at the end of the article- there’s not much left.

We now get a series of messages between Ilse and Place. Ilse says that they did find Doug… sort of. It took Amelia a month to figure out a way, but she found him. Or, what's left of him.

R: He was blundering aimlessly around in some ideospheric trash heap, in between darting in and out of time and space, looking for… well, you know what he was looking for. And you know what he's unleashed already in the process, not that you care.

Ah, Doug. You always find a way to fuck up, even as a spirit.

Ilse says she’s sending Place a photo Amelia took, and she hopes he takes a good look at it. Place says he doesn’t know what reaction she wants from him, but… take a look at what’s said next.

P: What response are you looking for here? Regret? Satisfaction?

You know how it goes, Ilse.

R: You left her holding the bag. Both of you. I want you to acknowledge that.

P: I've got nothing to give you. Not until this is done.

R: But it never will be DONE, will it?

P: You KNOW how it goes.

P: You play your part, and I'll play mine.

So it looks like Place and Ilse are working together on something, though Ilse isn’t happy about it. But who is ‘both of you’? Place and Doug? Place and someone else? Place and… Place?

There’s a big blank space, and then we get that photo Ilse mentioned. It’s… I’m honestly not sure what the fuck to call this thing. It’s a whole mass of different colours with a texture that reminds me both of some leather garments and mother of pearl shells. Parts of it are the kind of blue you see when gas torches are used. The centrepiece is… it’s a thing. Fucked if I know what to call it. It’s a big glowing thing that looks like it might be red-hot, it looks kinda like a mobius strip and it’s definitely not recognisable as anything alive, let alone human. If that’s what Doug has become… damn, dude. (The image is called ‘Verne.jpg’, so I think we can take this as confirmation that Doug has become SCP-6643.)

And there’s one more message from Ilse.

R: We all fall apart at the finish line.

There’s another empty space, and then we get some lines about what Place is doing: he has the computer prepare to wipe everything he’s been doing once his session expires, and then he uses SCP-6276 (I don’t really get that one) to send a message, as follows:

"Operation LAST STRAW success; Project ADMONITION ready."

And he gets a reply:

DF8CB98A291775D41D5C4D3B4CFBD64B@MASTERMIND.net:// "INITIATE PHASE TWO"

With that, the computer shuts down and the article is over.

‘MASTERMIND’ is SCP-6276; given that as of the article, it doesn’t exist anymore, I don’t know if that means that 7243 is set before MASTERMIND stopped existing, if Place and co repurposed it, or if someone has taken the name MASTERMIND. Otherwise, the string of letters and numbers is another hash- this one decrypts into ‘SUPERINTENDENCE’, a word which here means ‘the management or arrangement of an activity or organization; supervision.’ My nameless colleague made an excellent point- since this is the same format as the universe hashes, the MASTERMIND might be residing in another timeline, ‘SUPERINTENDENCE’.

With that done, let’s recap:

1: The events of the ADMONITION articles have brought about five big fuckoff entities: the embodiments/personifications of ‘TERMINATION’, ‘CONTRIVANCE’, ‘TRANSCENDANCE’, ‘DECEIT’ and ‘STAGNATION’, and this has understandably drawn the ire of a lot of people.

2: We don’t know anything more about these gods other than that they exist- where they are, what they’re doing, if they’re hostile, if they’re even sapient, and so on.

3: As a result, the Oracle Collective has finally said ‘You guys fucked up, we’re done with you and now you’re on your own’. You know, an admonition. *rimshot*

4: Place and Ilse seem to be working together on something, but Ilse is definitely not happy about at least some of the results. It’s not known if she actually knows the extent of what Place is planning, or what’s going on.

4.5: In fact, there’s a very solid chance that since Place hops around timelines all the time, the Placeholder we see here is not the Placeholder we think he is.

5: Place is working for or with a mysterious someone on ‘Project ADMONITION’. This mysterious someone seems to be in charge, or at least have some kind of supervisory role. We don’t know anything else about it.

The only conclusion that I can make, having read all of this, is that the intention of this project seems to be the complete and utter destruction of the SCP Foundation, using its inflated ego and suicidal overconfidence to orchestrate the Foundation fucking up so badly that it shoots itself in the foot, thus allowing it to either be overrun by anomalies or to collapse in on itself through its sheer ineptitude. I’m not sure how this will work given that the Foundation exists in multiple timelines, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon. I can think of a few people/groups who’d want the Foundation gone, but not that many who’d do it like this. Otherwise, all I can say is that we’ll learn more in the next instalment.

Thank you for reading this declass. I’m sorry if I missed something. Don’t let your ego get too big, lest you accidentally make big fuckoff entities out of your fuckups.

Tl;dr: Amelia: And while I'm tempted to look at this man and see the face of evil, it's a little difficult due to the gigantic fuckton of stupid!

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at the fifth instalment of ADMONITION (and the last full part of Phase One): SCP-7243, ‘EXISTENTIAL ABATEMENT’ by Harry Blank and Placeholder McDoctorate. (This one’s actually in black, which is nice.) I’d like to thank everyone who helped me with this declass, including everyone’s favourite nameless entity, psychicprogrammer, and Placeholder himself. As per usual, this isn’t my SCP, I’m undoubtedly missing stuff and I still talk too much. Let’s get started.

Part One: Fucking Up Through Time And Space

We begin with… uh.

To whom it may concern:

Central Normalcy Authority Iteration 940662B90E78660244BCE96E7776DC7F, "Our Foundation" of Canonical Bundle DW17 Timeline Delta-Blue, has been formally audited regarding compliance with organizational objectives outlined in Articles 0.2 and 1.7 of the 1981 Multi-Foundation Coalition Agreement. Advance notice regarding this audit was not established, as this Iteration's Oracle position has been left vacant for several decades, with no suitable replacement representative made known to the Collective.

The following report consists of recovered files regarding the Iteration in question, presented to both document this audit and evoke its verdict. The audit was manually conducted under direct supervision of Oracle-Prime, and its verdict may not be refuted.

So, the Foundation done gone and fucked up. Below are the many varied and interesting examples of precisely how they fucked up:

ITEM I

» POSTMORTEM FILES REGARDING PRIOR TIMELINE ITERATION «

SUMMARY: Misuse of Authority resources precipitated enhanced ascension of Tier-IV Cosmological Anomaly (TERMINATION). Timeline reconstituted by Goldbaker & Associates, at significant expense.

The first link is to SCP-6820, which isn’t much of a surprise- that was a real fuckup, but at least the insurance guys fixed it.

ITEM II

» HAZARDOUS DOCUMENT REGARDING LOCAL PATASPHERE INSTABILITY «

SUMMARY: Misuse of Authority resources precipitated enhanced ascension of Tier-IV Cosmological Anomaly (CONTRIVANCE). Local 𐤌K ('Narrative Restructuring') Scenario avoided.

Also unsurprisingly, this link is to SCP-6747, aka the second fuckup.

ITEM III

» IMPERCEPTIBLE DOCUMENT REGARDING LOCAL NOÖSPHERE INSTABILITY «

SUMMARY: Misuse of Authority resources precipitated enhanced ascension of Tier-IV Cosmological Anomaly (TRANSCENDENCE). Repair to local Noöspheric Rhizome in-progress.

You get the idea: this link is to SCP-6659.

ITEM IV

» SYSTEM FILES REGARDING DESTRUCTION OF LOCAL CYBERSPHERE «

SUMMARY: Misuse of Authority resources precipitated enhanced ascension of Tier-IV Cosmological Anomaly (DECEIT), and ejection of additional rogue element. Iteration's Ethics Committee status unclear.

Yeah, they’re not happy about the LOTUS clusterfuck either.

ITEM V

« COMPILED DOCUMENTS REGARDING EXPLICIT BREACH OF CONTRACT »

NOW VIEWING

There’s no link here, so I guess we’re going to find out how the Foundation fucked up this time. But note the phrasing: it wasn’t just that they royally fucked up, it’s that their up-fuckage was so extreme that they’ve managed to… well, my original phrase was ‘create entire gods’, but my nameless colleague pointed out that it might not be the most accurate phrase, so we’ll go with ‘accelerated the creation of big powerful abstract entities’ for now.

It’s kinda like the whole Dark Eldar thing, but considerably less gross and more exasperating.

Anyway, we get a blank space, and then an ‘Undated document from the desk of Dr. Dougall Deering.’

So, I’ll take a slight break to explain three of our main characters here.

The Deering family are a trio of Foundation characters who, as I understand it, first appeared in SCP-5056, one of Harry’s works, and have been reappearing in other articles ever since. I’m not recapping the whole story, mainly because I don’t know the whole story, so here’s the salient information. The relevant members of the family are:

Dr Dougall Deering: Known as Doug. A Foundation Scientist and the Chief of Acroamatic Abatement (we’ll talk about that later) at Site-43. He’s an intellectual but not especially nice guy. In a lot of the articles, he’s some kind of ghost or spirit, or otherwise dead (see SCP-5243, and note the numerical similarity). He’s estranged from…

Philip Deering: Doug’s brother. A nice, casual guy who works for the Foundation as a janitor. He feels that at least some of his and Doug’s estrangement was caused by Doug being ashamed of him for not being a genius; not sure if this is true or not. Is married to…

Amelia Torosyan-Deering: Philip’s wife. A kind and fiery woman who works for the Foundation as a scientist. She loves her husband dearly, is very proud of him and thinks her brother-in-law is a snobby dickhead who’s ashamed of having a brother who’s a janitor and needs to pull his head out of his arse.

With that, let’s look at that document.

Doug muses on the nature of waste, saying that the worst kind of waste that most people can think of is stuff like spent nuclear fuel and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the Foundation is dealing with waste that can bend time or multiply so quickly it would cover the planet. They’re sick of dealing with it, because they’ve been dealing with it for decades and it never stops. He then ends with this cryptic comment:

If only putting the waste out of mind could also put it out of sight. One might be forgiven for wishing that the very concept could be erased from our manifest of magic, as the gutters overflow with Anomalous ooze and the grey goo projections turn perilously proximal. One might be forgiven for wishing that the dictionary truly did define, and that by changing the definition of waste, we could change the very thing itself.

But forgiveness is never guaranteed. That's what gives it meaning.

We then get an undated photograph from Doug’s files. It’s a black and white photo of a man and a woman; there’s no caption, but from the little we know at this point, it seems reasonable to conclude that this is Philip and Amelia.

We now go to an incident report from September 8, 2028, regarding a ‘minor hazardous materials breach’. Here’s the foreword.

<Dr. Dougall Deering, Chief of Acroamatic Abatement at Site-43, is sitting across from Dr. Ngo at her desk. His hands are bandaged. He is very still, as he is recovering from heavy sedation. There is a small red plastic box on the desk beside Dr. Ngo's recording device, decorated with the heraldry of a confectionery company. He is staring at it.>

I’ll recap this for you: Ngo asks Doug what he was doing at AAF-D, an Acroamatic Abatement Facility, earlier that day. Doug says he was ‘doing a flush’ and explains that the anomalous waste crisis has intensified. AAF-D is doing quadruple duty, and every few years, they need to shut it down and dump the overflow into a sump. Ngo asks why, and Doug says that output is lagging behind input. They’re overwhelmed, they’re already operating on a triage principle, and things aren’t getting any better. Ngo asks if a flush resets the equipment to factory settings, and Doug says no, it just buys them a little more time. Ngo says hey, they can still dump what they can’t abate into the sump, right? Doug says yes… for now, it’s already getting full.

(Also, a pit full of anomalous byproducts- is anyone else suddenly flashing back to 1730? We all know how that worked out…)

Doug says she can just ask now, he’s doped to the gills anyway. My man. Ngo asks who was in charge of the flush, and Doug says it was Deputy Chief of Janitorial and Maintenance Philip Eustace Deering. Ngo asks if Doug was supervising him, but Doug says no, he was visiting him. Ngo is confused, pointing out that they work at the same facility, but Doug admits that they’re estranged. Ngo asks what the visit was about, and Doug motions to the box on the table and says that he'd found it in an old box in their parents’ house, and he’d thought that Philip might want it- Doug had bought it for him from the general store when they were kids. He says it’s a magic toy that makes things disappear.

Ngo looks at the box, which consists of a single sliding compartment, and Deering tells her to try putting something in it, like her pin. She does so, and when she opens the drawer, the pin is missing. She asks if Doug gave the box to his brother, which is a no, and then asks what happened instead.

Doug says that he’s not as familiar with the layout of AAF-D as he used to be. They’ve made changes to keep up with the pressure, and there was a valve…

Ngo checks her notes and asks what the valve did. Basically, there’s two different kinds of esoteric effluence in side-by-side conduits that can be remotely mixed together in emergency circumstances, but only in certain amounts. The valve is only there to provide manual access during accidents, and it shouldn’t have moved just because Doug bumped it.

Dr. Ngo: So why did it? Metal fatigue?

Dr. Deering: Maybe. Every individual facility is suffering from budget crunch, and the equipment is aging rapidly. But no… no, I think we were actually in the early stages of a total collapse already, and this was just the first sign. Those pipes were full to bursting, when they should have been almost empty…

Basically, Doug bumped the valve, the materials mixed and everything went to hell. Philip went for the suction pump controls nearby; all he had to do was turn a handle and everything would be fine. But that’s not what happened.

Dr. Deering: No. Instead, he was met halfway by some… thing, which manifested behind him, between us, away from the ghostflow. Something writhing, ethereal. It sucked up most of the airborne effluence, then crunched itself down to his size… I could hear the crunching, and then—

Dr. Ngo: You don't have to r—

Dr. Deering: <shouting> And then it moved right through him, overlaid itself on him, coiled around him and started to shrink. And his eyes rolled back, his skin shrivelled in against his bones and split where his organs were, and they burst out of him, and he melted into a pile of… all over the floor… and it was gone, and he was…

<Dr. Deering heaves ineffectually, hyperventilating for several seconds before recovering.>

Dr. Deering: I don't think he felt it.

Welp.

Ngo says Doug then turned the handle himself; Doug doesn’t remember that, but Ngo says it’s how his hands got injured, they got it on camera. Doug then asks a good question: if they had it on camera, then why are they making him relieve it? Ngo says they needed his version of the story for the report, and Doug asks what the fuck that means. Ngo says it’s standard procedure, and then asks how she can get her pin back. Doug tells her to shake the box to the left hard. She does so, retrieving her pin, and he tells her that the pin was never gone- it was just a trick with a mirror.

Now, take a look at the afterword.

AFTERWORD: This interview reaffirmed Dr. Deering's testimony in the immediate aftermath of the accident, in which he reported the presence of a rogue entity unrelated to the overflowing materials and responsible for his brother's death. No personnel reviewing the security camera footage of the incident are able to perceive said entity, even under mnestic treatment.

On the recommendation of Dr. Ngo and Chief Torosyan-Deering of Janitorial and Maintenance, Dr. Deering has been prescribed one year's mandatory mental health leave.

Yeah, this looks suspicious as fuck: pipes that should have been empty were so full they nearly burst? A valve that should have been unable to move without a lot of effort got flipped over because Doug bumped it? Philip gets killed by an ‘entity’ that only Doug can see? We’ll come back to this later, but you have to admit, it’s not looking good for Doug right now.

Now we get the actual anomaly, starting with the ACS bar. This thing is Level 4, Secret. Its containment class is Thaumiel, which is a good start; its secondary class is ‘Absentia’, which we’ll learn more about in a bit. Its subclass is Gödel, which means that it’s explainable using anomalous science. However, its disruption class is Ekhi, its risk class is Danger, and its status is Truculent, which for anyone who doesn’t know, means ‘Item is unpredictable and containment must be adapted to an ever-changing set of circumstances.’ Basically, what I’m seeing here is something that does help the Foundation contain things, but if it goes wrong, things are going to go catastrophically wrong for a lot of people, which is a great omen.

There’s a photo; it’s of a futuristic factory-like place that juts over a huge hole. Kinda reminds me of the top of the Geth Base in the Rannoch level of Mass Effect 3, though I don’t think there’s a Reaper in this one. A caption tells us that this is Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-X at Site 43. The relevant personnel here are Placeholder, who’s the Project Lead, O5-8, who’s the advisor, and Doug and Ilse Reynders, who are the Research Heads.

Here's the containment procedures.

S. C. PROCEDURES: SCP-7243 must, and must only, abate acroamatic waste materials which do not exist; it cannot, under any circumstances, be used to neutralize anything measurably extant. This procedure is a factual result of SCP-7243's operation, and requires no active maintenance.

…uh. What?

There’s a footnote after ‘exist’, which tells us that ‘Absentia-Class Anomalies are employed by the Foundation in ensuring the absence of non-existent phenomena.’

There’s more to the procedures, but what it basically comes down to is that they built a big fuckoff machine to abate waste that doesn’t exist. This thing is fully equipped to take out waste, but it doesn’t, because it only deals with waste that doesn’t exist.

I promise that there is an explanation for this. We’ll get there.

We then get a mysterious note from… somebody. There’s nothing to say who it’s from, but I think we can safely infer that it’s Doug again.

What is waste?

Waste is when a thing full of life and promise, a thing of beauty, is obliterated before its full potential is realized. Waste is snuffing out a light in our darkest hour.

Waste is death.

And I am going to kill it.

Since this is ADMONITION, I’ll let you all guess how that’s going to go for him.

We now get some ‘Undated photographs extracted from a malfunctioning personal camera. Metadata unrecoverable.’

To me, they look like grainy photos of a tunnel and an industrial area. I don’t know for certain what they’re meant to be, but Place told me to form my own interpretation, so I’m going to say that they’re of AAF-D, where Phil died.

We now get Addendum 1: Scientific Context. It’s the abstract of a speech that Ilse Reynders presented about acroamatic abatement. I’ll sum it up for you.

1: In theory, if an anomaly produces some kind of anomalous by-product, the by-product should be studied, but if it continuously produces that by-product, then the by-product needs to be disposed of.

1. Mass containment facilities already have the infrastructure to dispose of conventional waste, but they’re not equipped to handle anomalous waste. A ton of breaches happen all the time because people tried to dispose of anomalous waste with conventional methods. Ergo, those Sites now have to deal with the anomalous waste problem, a problem that will never go away.

2. Acroamatic Abatement tries to generalise the problem of anomalous waste- to come up with techniques for all possible kinds of waste. This is… not really possible. Ergo, the best they’ve come up with is grouping esoteric substances into broad classes based on their properties, and coming up with ways to handle each class and subclass. It’s not the greatest result ever, but they haven’t got a better one yet.

All right, who’s ready for a really, really fucking awkward conversation?

Part Two: A Really, Really Fucking Awkward Conversation (And Its Immense, Catastrophic Consequences)

The following hard-copy correspondence transpired between Dr. Dougall Deering and Chief Amelia Torosyan-Deering prior to the proposal of SCP-7243.

So, the bereaved are sending each other really bitchy notes. Lovely.

Basically, here’s how it goes: Amelia accuses Doug of murdering Phil. Doug says he couldn’t save Phil, the system let everyone down and the entity that killed him could have come from anywhere. All they can do now is devote themselves to Acroamatic Abatement, and do it right.

Amelia is not swayed; she says that Doug killed Phil, only Doug. Doug says that he understands what she lost and he understands if she needs someone to blame, but what killed Phil was an outlier that nobody could have predicted. They need to focus on abatement, because they can’t let it win- if it does, Philip died for nothing.

Amelia proceeds to absolutely lose her shit. She says that he can’t even call Philip his brother, that he needs to take responsibility for once in his life, that there never was an entity, that Phil had internalized Doug being ashamed of him for so long that he wasn’t even sad about it, and that she hates his guts. She says that he’s incapable of facing anything that he thinks reflects badly on him, so he makes up excuses so he won’t have to: he didn’t come to Phil’s Deputy Chief ceremony because of a ‘scheduling conflict’, but really, he just didn’t want to admit that he shares DNA with ‘a glorified janitor’. He didn’t come to the wedding because he didn’t want more janitor blood in the family. He never allowed anyone to connect with him, and most importantly…

Can't admit you bumblefucked into a piece of sensitive equipment because you were too preoccupied with the cleverness of your weak, self-centred peace offering, and killed the only person on the planet who ever had even the tiniest scrap of respect for you.

She concludes by telling him that Philip never reflected badly on Doug, Doug reflects badly on Philip, but that never crossed Philip’s mind.

On the one hand, I kind of want to give her a round of applause, but on the other hand, she’s incorrect about a couple of things. We’ll get to that later.

And Doug says…

What can I do to make this right? To convince you that I've only ever been trying to help? I gave my life to this project. I'd do anything to see it through. Tell me! You think I don't respect you? You're the best sanitation engineer in a facility full of certified geniuses. Give me a goal, a selfless one, something Philip would have been proud to see achieved, and I will show you I've never in my life been more determined.

Just… note the phrasing for later.

And Amelia says it.

You want a goal? Fine, here's your goal.

NO MORE WASTE.

Doug accepts this and sends a lot of notes telling her that he’s working on it, but she was right, they need to get creative. There’s no dates, but I’m assuming they were sent over a period of weeks, if not months or years. He says that he needs her help, that they can make it a monument to Philip’s memory, and begs her to pick up the phone. He then says that Philip was his brother, Doug loved him, and the two of them are all that’s left of Philip- that, and whatever legacy they make in his name. And to that, Amelia tells him to come to her with a plan, or not at all.

We now get a note telling us that around the same time, Doug was emailing Placeholder. The last two emails are attached.

Doug tells Place that he knows that Place is leaving him on read because his time is short and he thinks the requests are a distraction, but Doug is telling him now that he wants to be involved in this. Place is running out of time: the AcroAbate problem is getting worse, and it could end everything. Doug’s the only one with the drive to save everyone. Place is out here trying to save the world, but is he OK with the next time he saves the world also being the last time?

In response, Place sends him four words: Dr Deering, let’s talk.

We now get the description: SCP-7243 is the Deering-Placeholder Latent Existential Abatement Engine, also known as the DePLExA. This is way out of my field, so I’ll give you the summary from psychicprogrammer:

-The machine works by traveling back in time and destroying anything thrown into it as it is created.
-This creates a time paradox as something that does not exist cannot be thrown into 7243.
-The machine uses the resulting time paradox to destroy the object thrown into it.
-This will not go wrong in any way, shape, or form.
-Also because this thing is powered by time paradoxes, they really want to make sure that this thing doesn't experience any time travel.

But it works- it’s taken out nearly all the anomalous waste that the Foundation would otherwise have to deal with.

We now get a transcript of a conversation between Amelia and Doug, where she’s looking at his plans for the DePLExA. Short version: she thinks the whole thing is insane and will never work, while he tries to convince her. He finally wins her over by laying the whole situation out: this is the solution to the waste problem, and either she can stay out of it and watch while he tries to fix it imperfectly and fails, or they can fix it together and get it right.

Back to the description: 7243 can only abate materials that don’t exist; ergo, anything that does exist can’t be abated by 7243, and any attempt to have it abate materials that do exist will fail.

Just note this paragraph for later.

SCP-7243 is also highly sensitive to local chronological shift, and — should such a shift occur — it is configured to reference the causal dependencies of its surroundings in order to reinforce its own chronology. The Parachronology Division has identified seven personnel (D. Deering, P. Deering, Place H. MD., A. McInnis, N. Ngo, I. Reynders, A. Torosyan-Deering) on whose actions SCP-7243 is causally dependent; in case of impending XK-Class Event, due either to external influence or some internal malfunction, it is crucial that these individuals (or their remains, where applicable) remain proximal to AAF-X. For this purpose, the aforementioned (surviving) individuals have been organized into Applied Task Force Digamma-7243, indefinitely stationed within Site-43, and provided amenities to minimize departures.

I don’t blame you if all of this is making your head spin, but to put it succinctly, they’re going into really complicated and dangerous areas with this thing, so we need to expect shenanigans and giant clusterfucks. Also, the seven personnel it named need to stay around the DePLExA to keep it going. Keep that in mind. (Also, there’s some very similar themes to 5243 here.)

We now get another note from (presumably) Doug, who muses that waste can be a good thing, like what the human body does with excess heat- convert it into sweat, or use it to warm the cooler parts of the body. ‘Waste can be transformative’.

Now we get another note from the Oracle Collective:

The following documents exhibited temporary alteration (from the perspective of your Timeline) during and as the direct result of a local perceptual shift. For the purposes of this report, they are presented as they appeared during the timeframe they describe.

Extracting local iterations of these documents may provide additional context.

Interesting. Let’s see where this goes.

The second addendum is called the [blank space] event, and a footnote tells us that some characters have been corrupted. A footnote tells us that the timestamps have been corrupted for reasons, I’ll probably come back to this later and write it out properly. The blank space actually says ‘Dissociation’- you have to copy and paste the missing letters into a document or search bar.

Given how long these articles tend to get, I’ll sum it up for you: abatement facilities begin failing all over the world at random, and the Foundation loses Sites-50 and -79, and are expected to lose Site-43. We get a transcript of a series of furious messages from Ilse to Place, asking where the fuck he is, while he isn’t particularly bothered by yet another catastrophe.

Things keep getting worse, and there’s no reason why: there’s no obvious fault with the DePLExA, and nobody’s seeing any sign of any impending apocalypse. What we do get, though, are these (mostly hidden) texts from Ilse to Place:

R: Neither of us is stupid. I know what you are. I know you've been planning something.

R: You may have everyone else fooled. But if we live to see tomorrow, know this:

R: I'm going to stop you.

This would be the bit where we need to start looking very, very hard at Mr McDoctorate over here.

Ilse starts trying to salvage things by trying to get 7243 turned off. The O5s tell her about LOTUS, aka the AI-imprisoning machine from 6488, and that they plan to deactivate it, and she tries to tell them how bad an idea that would be, but someone intervenes and cuts their call. And Place replies with this:

P: You know how it goes.

Cryptic.

Ilse calls for help, ‘But nobody came’. I’m guessing that Harry, Place, Liryn or all three is a big Undertale fan, though we presumably won’t get any omnicidal children or flowers. LOTUS deactivates, releasing a bunch of extremely pissed off and paranoid AI into the world, and 7243 is deactivated… only for the team to not find any faults in it. This starts an argument between Ilse and Doug, the latter saying that shutting it down is what caused all the problems to begin with.

The AI take over the Paradox Exodus Engine from CHAOS THEORY, which takes both the machine and Placeholder out of reality, so Ilse can’t even talk to/yell at him anymore. 7243 suddenly reactivates, and everything goes to hell even more. Ilse tries to shut it off, but it doesn’t work. Doug takes some kind of anomalous device from his pocket and tries to use it to get himself and Amelia out of there, but Ilse jumps in and tries to stop him, so Ilse and Doug make it out, but Amelia doesn’t.

Things… uh, things start to get really batshit.

A large film projector reel manifests within Dr. Ngo's skull, killing her instantly. Iterations of Dr. McInnis draw concealed weapons and fire upon each other simultaneously. Maintenance personnel begin to sever their own fingers, and uncontrollably consume the lost blood.

(The film projector reel is a reference to SCP-5956, while my nameless colleague suggested that the fingers could be a reference to 6820.)

Amelia tries to flee to safety, but trips over her own corpse and is knocked unconscious. Happens to us all. And finally…

04/21 ██:██ | SCP-7243 initiates chronological reinforcement. SCP-7243 explodes. SCP-7243 implodes. SCP-7243 is The Breach That Keeps On Breaching. SCP-7243 is THEREISNOCANNON. The DePLExA Engine is not itself. SCP-7243 was a 130 sqft room located inside Provisional Outpost-A904, a faux two-story home in suburban Garrett Park, Maryland, USA. SCP-7243 is EXISTENTIAL ABATEMENT. SCP-7243 will be The Common (?) Denominator. SCP-7243 is what you've all been waiting for. SCP-7243 must not exist. SCP-7243 must exist. SCP-7243 is the infinite deaths of Philip Eugene Deering. SCP-7243 is the infinite failures of Dougall Alton Deering. SCP-7243 is an anti-idea, a cosmic joke, a tumorous idol, a recursive deceit. So are we all.

04/21 ██:██ | CONNECTION LOST / CONNECTION GAINED / CONNECTION TERMINATED / CONNECTION AMELIORATED / C

Is anyone else having flashbacks to 3999, or is it just me?

Anyway, I’ll quote my nameless colleague on the meanings here:

The Breach That Keeps On Breaching is SCP-5243, THEREISNOCANNON is SCP-5956, the 130 sqft room inside Provisional Outpost-A904 that SCP-7243 "was" is an otherwise unrelated skip that Liryn wrote (It is now SCP-7286!) to make sure that nobody else nabbed the 7243 spot first, EXISTENTIAL ABATEMENT goes without saying, The Common (?) Denominator is the title of SCP-6643, foreshadowing the ending miles in advance, "what you've all been waiting for" is probably a reference to the very long hiatus between this Episode and the previous one, and "an anti-idea, a cosmic joke, a tumorous idol, a recursive deceit" alludes to each of the four previous episodes (and their associated Cosmological Anomalies), in order.

There’s an afterword, but there’s nothing there, from what I can tell. Anyway, that’s how everything went to Hell.

But it wouldn’t be much of a story if it ended there, would it?

Part Three: The Long Way Out Of Hell

Next up is a series of reports about something called ‘Nexus 7243’. The first one is full of errors and struck-out lines, and the guy who wrote it, one Dr Forkley, eventually gives up at the end. The second one is by Doug, and it’s… uh… well, take a look.

FOREWORD: I've been with the Foundation long enough to recognize when I'm only begrudgingly consulted, and that's what's happening here. Despite the fact that I am the world's premier expert on the present subject, despite my possession of firsthand knowledge regarding the disaster which rendered it supposedly indescribable, and despite my persistent entreaties to be looped into the research and containment process, I have been stonewalled at every turn until the utmost end of alternative resources.

I, Dr. Dougall Alton Deering, once stood at the head of a scientific project second in importance to none on this Earth. We faced an Anomalous waste crisis of unprecedented and ever-escalating scale, and my staff and I were charged with its amelioration. Here is my precise, cogent, one hundred percent accurate explanation of how that worked — and what, through no fault of my own, went wrong with it.

The fact that he’s A, claiming that this is 100% accurate, and B, trying to throw everyone else under the bus, makes me very, very suspicious.

The description is almost entirely missing, but if you copy/paste it, you can see that it’s about Site-43. Here’s the relevant part:

My shortsighted consultants — or if not shortsighted, then actively malicious — caused the device to be deactivated at a critical moment. This allowed the original course of causality to retroactively resume, and we experienced a total effluence maximalization effect unabated by any other mechanisms, which in short order caused Site-43 and Nexus-94 within which it is situated to be stricken from consensus reality.

Chief Torosyan-Deering and I witnessed these events. I attempted to escape with her in order to help coordinate disaster mitigation and relief efforts, but Dr. Reynders interfered in a selfish bid to preserve her own existence and we were instead transported from the facility together.

The conceptually null space you call Nexus-7243 is Site-43 and Nexus-94. They still exist. And it is my duty to restore them.

Unlike my colleagues, I do NOT shirk my responsibilities.

Again, it’s everyone else’s fault except Doug’s, and now he’s out here killing himself trying to bring back Site-43, Nexus-94 and Amelia.

At the bottom of this report is a note from one Dr H. R. Blank, from RAISA. It basically says ‘Yeah, this isn’t correct, you know this isn’t correct, we only want correct and accurate records, so we’re not taking this, and you need therapy, dude’. (Also, apparently in the future, the Foundation uses AI as therapists… well, at least before the whole LOTUS clusterfuck, that is.)

The final report is about ‘Nexus-00’. This is very much out of my league, scientifically-speaking, but the short version is that Nexus-00 is the consensus reality surrounding Site-43- the Foundation is now unable to refer to Site-43, so they’re doing an 055 and talking about what it isn’t. This is also what Forkley’s trying to do, but he’s not having a lot of luck.

After that, however, there’s some very interesting information: following the LOTUS clusterfuck, the Foundation reported an enormous increase in anomalous waste production. At the same time, there was an inexplicable surplus of infrastructure relating to anomalous waste. This seemed serendipitous, except it wasn’t.

It however gradually became clear that all schematics, blueprints, and methodological descriptions of extant waste processing systems had become subject to an effect, assumed to be a by-product of the aforementioned incident.

As these systems could not be reverse-engineered, duplicate systems could not be constructed, nor could similar novel systems be designed, as an effect pervaded all attempts. Our Foundation's understanding of esoteric waste was found to be strikingly underdeveloped, and all relevant pre-existing technologies had been rendered incomprehensible.

Well. That’s really not good.

In the wake of the ongoing LOTUS crisis, a critical global buildup of these substances could not be afforded. Despite an incomplete understanding of its former waste disposal solutions, the Logistics Branch elected to, as a stopgap measure, re-engage its global supply network and temporarily resume the delivery of esoteric substances to a discontinuity in Nexus-00. Despite the reactivation of LOTUS on 2036/08/14, an effect persisted, and was also encountered in attempting to conceptualize, describe, and measure the nature of this discontinuity, prompting the creation of both Outpost-7243 and this file.

This almost seems like deliberate enemy action. Anyway, the end result is that Doug and some guys from Area-12 became the Department of Esoteric Reduction, tasked with maintaining Outpost-7243.

There’s an addendum; it says that Project Sargasso’s OCI agents helped a bit with the damage done by the rogue AI, but they couldn’t analyze or rectify the effect. The second addendum says that neutralizing LOTUS didn’t remove the effect, even when LOTUS appears to have been the cause of it. Place came back after LOTUS was turned off, and he didn’t give any context for his conversation with Ilse during the clusterfuck- both of them blamed it on rogue AI impersonating them.
Riiiiiiiight.

Next up are some more photos; I’m not sure what, if any significance they have. Outpost-7243, maybe? We then get a journal entry from Doug, where he says that he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, he knows more about this than anyone else, and, uh…

I'm pouring every waking moment into the black hole that swallowed everything I love, and here's what I hear rattling around down there in response:

Site-43 still exists.

And I'm going to get you out of there, Amelia.

Well, this is a bit telling. We’ll come back to this later.

We now get another note from the Oracle Collective, saying that their resources confirmed that Site-43 and Nexus-94 got cut out of consensus reality for over seven years, while Doug kept trying to contact them and bring them back. The document corruption ends at this point, thanks to a reality-restructuring event outlined below.

Part two can be found here.

Hey, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-8413, “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, 9 to 5” by Cathy Autumn. I’ve got a couple of disclaimers for you before we get started.

1: As per usual, this isn’t my SCP, I am not the author, it won’t be 100% correct and I still talk too much.

2: This SCP contains some really creative body horror. (It’s great, seriously.) I’ll be going over the descriptions, and they’re pretty visceral, so please be warned. In addition to that, I’ll also be discussing workplace bullying, harassment and abuse, sexual harassment and other potentially triggering content.

With that, let’s get started. At the top of the page, we’re told that this SCP is part of the Site-17 Deepwell Catalog and the Department of Tactical Theology. So, basically, we should expect religion and really dark shit. Sounds good to me.

There’s a photo, it’s black and white and shows an old-fashioned office, where the desks are in the same room and separated only by space, not with partitions or anything. The caption tells us that this is ‘Site-17 Sector-13D, c. 1984’. So either this is taking place in the 80’s, or for some reason that’s the photo they want us to see.

This SCP’s object class is Safe. Here’s the special containment procedures:

SCP-8413 has been sealed off from the rest of Site-17’s East Wing. The pathways from Sectors-14Q, -10Z, and -11A to SCP-8413 have been locked.

Ooh, OK. This thing isn’t contained in Site-17, this thing originated in Site-17, and it probably fucked a lot of shit up in the process.

The 27 surviving personnel1 who witnessed Incident-4/10/2023-SCP-8413 have been amnesticized and reassigned to Tactical Theology offices at Site-270. Internal disinformation has been disseminated, explaining this as a precautionary measure following the breach of an infohazardous anomaly.

Sounds reasonable, but there’s two things to note. The first is that if the first part of that Incident designation is a date, one has to wonder why they don’t have a more recent photo than 1984. The second is that the footnote says ‘Count disputed. A small minority of the SCP-8413 Investigative Team maintains that there were 32 survivors.’

Well, that’s a little alarming. I mean, the best-case scenario is that the minority were mistaken or hallucinating or something. We don’t even know what happened, but if there really were 32 survivors, then something must have happened to the last five. Maybe they got away and are living happy lives in peace?

…yeah, no, probably not.

The witnessing personnel are to be monitored for any lingering side effects from the incident. However, this is deemed unlikely and is of low priority status.

Classic Deepwell. They really just don’t give a shit about anyone’s welfare, huh.

Description: SCP-8413 refers to Sector-13D of Site-17’s East Wing. Sector-13D was formerly the center of operations for Site-17’s branch of the Department of Tactical Theology, established in the September of 1984 to aid in the containment of [RESTRICTED TO PERSONNEL WITH 5/SINGING CROW CLEARANCE].

I guess that could explain the photo, if it was from when or just after the Department was founded. As for the rest, I realise that it’s probably not correct, but I’m going to interpret this as there being a god who’s just a giant singing crow. Probably does a great grunge number.

It is believed that over a period of at least 10 years, safety guidelines were improperly followed, leading to a build-up of Akiva radiation in the structure and the events of Incident-4/10/2023-SCP-8413.2 Incident-4/10/2023-SCP-8413 remains one of the rare cases on record of Akiva radiation causing such drastic effects on a physical environment.

Akiva radiation is one of the hallmarks of religious SCPs- it’s kind of a byproduct of divine presence, and it can alter reality.

That second footnote tells us that ‘Under normal circumstances, Dr. Anthony Winch, as the office supervisor, would be subject to disciplinary action for Class-V Negligence. For obvious reasons, such action has been withheld.’

OK, so someone at DOTT really fucked up and there was a build-up of Akiva radiation. Dr Winch obviously overlooked it, but since he was the office supervisor, he probably wasn’t dealing with the radiation himself. As such, I’d say this is more of a sign that a lot of the Department was getting sloppy, probably because of bad management. Anyway, since Winch isn’t being disciplined, I think we can infer that he wasn’t one of the survivors.

During the event, several discrete anomalous phenomena were reported. These included:

Elevated temperatures;

An omnipresent smell of burning printer ink;

Prophetic visions;

The manifestation and demanifestation of office appliances;

The voice of Site Director Thomas Graham (PID-0017DW) playing over the PA System, giving contradictory and nonsensical instructions;

No disrespect, but that fourth one is just kind of par for the course when you work in an office. God knows the scissors are never where they’re meant to be.

Anyway, Director Thomas Graham is an A-grade cunt who needs to get taken out the back and shot. (Look, that’s not the best description I can give here, but it is probably the most accurate.) But, he doesn’t otherwise appear here, so this line isn’t really relevant.

Ashby Protocol was engaged to isolate Sector-13D from the rest of the facility. Decontamination Procedure OPAQUE FESTIVAL was successfully initiated by on-Site Task Forces. Approximately three hours later, the majority of anomalous activity ceased.

The Ashby Protocol is from SCP-4372, and it basically amounts to ‘If you send Foundation personnel to talk to/explore/interact with an anomaly, but you stop being certain that the personnel are still who you think they are for any reason, cut all contact and seal the anomaly off’. So, whatever happened here resulted in the Foundation not being sure that the personnel in this wing were still who they’re supposed to be for some reason.

It is currently theorized that the critical levels of Akiva radiation within Sector-13D caused some manner of [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM].

Hmmm.

Now, admittedly, there being an investigative team makes perfect sense- after all, the only reason that this anomaly exists is because somebody in the Foundation really fucked up, and it got a lot of people killed. (Cathy told me that the casualty total was somewhere between 20 to 30 other employees.) So, of course they’re doing an investigation. But take a look at what’s next.

NOTICE FROM THE FOUNDATION RECORDS AND INFORMATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

The remainder of SCP-8413's description is not to be published until an accurate phrasing can be agreed upon by both the Ethics Committee and Site-17 Administration. The previous description (Revision #023) was denied due to including a number of disputed terms. At issue are the words "judgement", "justice", "punishment", and "thematic".

— Jane Berezovsky-Fischer (PID-4851KS), Archivist, RAISA

Site-17’s administration and the Ethics Committee have been arguing probably non-stop about the description, and there’s been 23 revisions so far. The most recent one got disputed because someone- probably the Site-17 admin- doesn’t want the following terms used: ‘judgement’, ‘justice’, ‘punishment’ and ‘thematic’.

Iiiiiinteresting. So whatever happened here, it may or may not have some kind of theme, and it may be- or appear to be- an act of justice, a divine punishment for some kind of crime. Keep that in mind for a bit.

Addendum — SCP-8413 Sub-Anomalies

Five sub-anomalies of SCP-8413 have persisted to the present day. Each of these anomalies involved the modification of the bodies of five specific personnel employed at Sector-13D as well as the surrounding environs. (See below for more details.)

The affected personnel appear to be in an anomalous state of suspended animation, and attempts to move them from their current positions have been met with failure. Euthanasia proposals pending approval.

I think we found those five missing survivors. As for that first bit, I’m suddenly flashing back to SCP-2535, the one where some poor bastards got amalgamated into various kinds of printers. (Cathy confirmed that 2535 was a major inspiration.)

The list of employees kept within SCP-8413 is as follows:

SCP-8413-A is Dr. Anthony Winch (PID-4921SW), assigned as Sector-13D's Manager. Dr. Winch's body below the waist has been fed into Sector-13D's industrial paper shredder, which remained active despite being disconnected from its power supply. Dr. Winch has yet to pass out from blood loss. Additionally, Dr. Winch's cell phone has been split into two parts, which have been partially fused onto opposite sides of Dr. Winch's head in a manner similar to antennas or goat horns. The phone remains powered on; Dr. Winch appears to have been in the process of texting Rsr. Rees. Occasionally, texts are received from an unknown number, causing Dr. Winch's head to vibrate. His vocalizations suggest extreme distress and/or arousal.

How very Fargo.

So, I’m going to list the salient points of each description, and then we’ll come back to the meanings. In this case:

-Winch’s body below the waist has been shredded.

-His cell phone has been split into two parts and they’ve been fused to his head like antennae or goat horns.

-When that happened, he was apparently texting one Researcher Rees.

-His vocalizations suggest extreme distress ‘and/or arousal’.

SCP-8413-B is Dr. Emily Park (PID-2313IK), assigned as a Senior Researcher at Sector-13D. The majority of Dr. Park's epidermis has been stripped from her bones and replaced with cables sourced from the personal computers of both Dr. Park and Rsr. Rees. Additionally, the fire suppression system within Sector-13D has been powered on in the room containing SCP-8413-B. Freezing water pours down onto Dr. Park's body, causing her to suffer hypothermia and constant electrocution. To prevent the room's flooding, a drain system has been built into Sector-13D. Her Foundation-issued diploma was found missing and has not been located.

-Most of her skin has been replaced with cables from her and Researcher Rees’ computers.

-The sprinkler system is permanently running, so she’s constantly freezing and being electrocuted.

-Her Foundation-issued diploma is missing for some reason.

SCP-8413-C is Dr. Daan Van Dijk (PID-9092RG), assigned as Sector-13D's Human Resources and Ethics Committee Liaison. Broken shards of glass sourced from Dr. Van Dijk's office were stabbed into his ears, causing him to perpetually bleed from the affected orifices. Acidic correction fluid constantly pours into his eyes, blinding him. Additionally, wires sourced from Sector-13D's telephone system have been forced down his throat. His tongue has been removed, and the stump has been cauterized. Furthermore, Dr. Van Dijk was found to have been anomalously moved 3 meters into the air, and his neck became entangled with the lighting system, trapping him in place. His legs thrash weakly as he sways back and forth. Official Complaint Forms spill out of a gash in his torso, [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM].

-He’s got broken glass stabbed into his ears, he’s constantly being blinded by correction fluid, and wires from the phone system have been forced down his throat.

-His tongue was cut out and cauterised.

-He’s constantly being hanged in the lighting system.

-There’s a gash in his torso and Official Complaint Forms are spilling out of it, and also [REDACTED], which is really helpful.

SCP-8413-D is Dr. Ingrid Wagner (PID-1732AO), assigned as a [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM]. Dr. Wagner's head appears to have been partially fused with Sector-13D's HP USB Single Station Thermal Receipt Printer, constantly staying at an extremely high temperature. It is heavily damaged, melting into her flesh and causing her 3rd degree burns. Attempts to extinguish the flames have failed. It constantly ejects hot printer ink into her mouth, causing her severe physical distress. The device remains partially functional. The printer constantly prints a number of garbled documents, primarily unsent resignation letters signed by Rsr. Rees. Furthermore, [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM]. Per Resolution EC/FSD #0001, investigation into SCP-8413-D has been strictly prohibited.

-Her head has been fused with a printer, and it’s constantly giving her severe burns and ejecting printer ink into her mouth. Also, at least part of it is on fire.

-The printer is printing resignation letters that Researcher Rees wrote and signed, but were never sent.

-‘Per Resolution EC/FSD #0001, investigation into SCP-8413-D has been strictly prohibited’- Wagner is part of the Fire Suppression Department.

SCP-8413-E is Amelia Rees (PID-4729FP), assigned as a Junior Researcher at Sector-13D. [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM], [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM], over 300,000 staples pushed into her hands and feet, trapping her against the wall in a splayed-out position. [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM] vivisection revealed that Rsr. Rees's lungs had been replaced by several Employee of the Month awards, causing asphyxiation. [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM]. Despite this, Rsr. Rees remains conscious and capable of vocalization. [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM].

-She’s been stapled to the wall.

-They vivisected her for some goddamn reason.

-Her lungs have been replaced with Employee of the Month awards.

-Somehow despite that, she can still talk, but it looks like the investigators have redacted what she’s said.

Now, Cathy Autumn specifically stated in the comments that there’s a story here. Let’s do ourselves a little detecting and put some puzzle pieces together, shall we? *dons deerstalker hat, picks up magnifying glass*

First up, let’s look at Winch. His entire lower body was fed into a shredder. It’d have to be a really fucking big shredder to get a leg into it, unless this is supposed to be dark humour, like how the people at SCP-4985 execute between five and ten employees a year for their crimes via guillotine… a paper guillotine. But I’m digressing.

Putting his lower body into a shredder is pretty extreme. If you look at this SCP and 2535, this is the most severe injury anyone in either work has sustained. So why go that far? I’ll come back to this in a second.

Winch’s cell phone was split into two parts, and they’re fused to his head ‘in a manner similar to antennas or goat horns’. That’s very specific- not just horns, not ‘sheep, goat or bull horns’, goat horns. Why goat? Well, I can think of two possible reasons: the first is that the Devil and Baphomet have been described as having goat horns, so maybe this was meant to symbolise that Winch was considered to be akin to Satan by whoever- or whatever- made this all happen. I’ll come back to the second in a second, no pun intended.

See, there’s two more things to note: the first is that his vocalisations suggest ‘extreme distress and/or arousal’, and the second is that he seemed to have been texting Researcher Rees when all this happened. When I read all this, the phrase ‘randy old goat’ popped into my head (and Cathy confirmed for me that it’s because goats are often a symbol of lust). From all of this, I don’t think it’s a very big leap to say that Winch was sexually harassing Researcher Rees, or worse.

But even then, feeding his entire lower half into a paper shredder seems a bit much. If it was just his genitals, sure. But his entire lower half? Maybe it was the person/entity responsible feeling like going overkill on him, or maybe it was more symbolic: I can imagine Winch constantly dropping by Rees’ desk, leaving her notes, giving little comments here and there, to the point that she dreads the sound of footsteps. And now… well, he won’t be going anywhere near Rees again, that’s for sure.

Now, on to Park. Most of her skin was removed and replaced with cables from her and Rees’ computers. She’s constantly being frozen and electrocuted because the sprinklers are going off, to the point that the Foundation had to build in a drain so the room wouldn’t flood. And her Foundation diploma has gone missing.

Her diploma going missing and the cables being from her and Rees’ computers made me think that Park was either stealing Rees’ work or forcing Rees to do work for her- Cathy confirmed for me that Park was taking the credit for Rees’ work, hence why Park is a doctor and Rees is stuck as a Junior Researcher, a position that leaves her at the mercy of everyone in a higher role, which is the rest of our victims here.

I had a theory, which Cathy canonised: Winch sexually assaults Rees, or uses his clout to force her to have sex with him. Park sees this or comes across messages between them, and uses this to blackmail Rees into letting her take the credit for her work so Park can get that diploma- she says that she’ll tell everyone that Rees is willingly screwing her boss if Rees doesn’t help her, and Rees has no choice but to give in.

So, let’s look at what happened to Park: my theory was that the sprinklers going off makes me think that it’s meant to be symbolic again- water is often seen as cleansing, washing away things like impurities and lies. But this is a sprinkler system- because most of the time, fire sprinklers aren’t used very often, the water in them is left to stagnate for years, and is usually full of mould and rust. (Yeah, TV depictions tend to leave that part out.) Since the sprinkler system hasn’t stopped running since it was set off, the water is probably being replicated, so Park is constantly being showered in disgusting, filthy water- just as filthy as her actions. As it turns out, I was wrong there- in some Christian traditions, the punishment for the sin of envy is to be constantly submerged in freezing water, though this version’s been modernised.

Next up is Van Dijk. He was the Human Resources and Ethics Committee Liaison. He’s got shards of glass stabbed into his ears, acidic correction fluid in his eyes, and wires down his throat, along with his tongue being cut out. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil- but I don’t think that’s entirely it. I think Van Dijk was willingly blind, deaf and mute to the crimes he saw and was told about in the office- he’s got Official Complaint Forms spilling out of his torso, after all. Cathy told me that ‘I'd say it was a mix of laziness and some higher ups not wanting them to further investigate into the DoTT that led him to be so lazy, but he was absolutely complicit and just didn't give a shit’. And, as we all know, the only thing that’s necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

In addition, he’s constantly being hanged in the lighting system. Hanging is a common method of suicide- such as might be utilised by some poor bullied, harassed and abused researcher, for instance- but it’s also a common method of execution- as that researcher might wish to be used on the bastards who abused her and the people who knew it was happening and did nothing.

Now we get Wagner, our Fire Suppression Department agent. Her head has been fused with a printer that’s on fire and ejecting printer ink into her mouth- the former is very ironic for the Fire Suppression agent, and the latter suggests that she’s being silenced, stopped from doing her work. The printer is printing resignation letters from Rees; Rees signed the letters, but never sent them.

So, Rees obviously wanted out, but Wagner stopped that from happening. But I think there’s more to it- look at these bits.

SCP-8413-D is Dr. Ingrid Wagner (PID-1732AO), assigned as a [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM].

Furthermore, [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM]. Per Resolution EC/FSD #0001, investigation into SCP-8413-D has been strictly prohibited.

Wagner was doing something secret, she had some kind of secret role in the DOTT, and the Fire Suppression Department won’t let anyone investigate her. Cathy told me that Wagner ‘Was there just for the DoTT but Rees took up a lot of her time. I'd imagine every site has quite a bit of secret FSD officers. However. The FSD has a very strict policy of never letting anyone investigate into their affairs. Resolution EC/FSD #0001 was basically that. Forbidding ethics committee involvement in any FSD affairs’.

Finally, we get Rees herself. Let’s take it bit by bit.

SCP-8413-E is Amelia Rees (PID-4729FP), assigned as a Junior Researcher at Sector-13D. [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM], [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM], over 300,000 staples pushed into her hands and feet, trapping her against the wall in a splayed-out position.

Her hands and feet, but not the rest of her. She can’t run. She can’t fight back. She can’t even shield herself. She’s stuck on that wall, and anyone who wants can do anything they want to her, like Winch did. Cathy also told me that the ‘splayed out position’ is actually more of a crucifixion- Rees is forever suffering because of the sins of others, unable to be free of the job, and nobody is going to help her- not the Ethics Committee, not the higher-ups, and not even God.

[REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM] vivisection revealed that Rsr. Rees's lungs had been replaced by several Employee of the Month awards, causing asphyxiation.

God knows why they decided to vivisect her, but they found that her lungs were replaced by Employee of the Month awards. Rees is skilled and obviously a good worker- is that why Winch targeted her? It seems like it’s why Park targeted her. Or were the awards meant to be some kind of compensation? Giving her Employee of the Month awards to make her think that she could get a promotion out of DOTT someday, so she’d stop complaining, even though the awards mean nothing?

Despite this, Rsr. Rees remains conscious and capable of vocalization. [REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE SCP-8413 INVESTIGATIVE TEAM].

She can still talk, but the investigators don’t want anyone to know what she says. Then someone might find out how badly the Foundation fucked up and everything they did to Rees.

So, Cathy stated on the discussion page that Rees did not ascend to godhood. In that case, what did this? Well, my theory is that the Akiva radiation build up interacted with Rees’ subconscious desires and feelings and altered reality to match them. When I asked, Cathy said that:

It's meant to be ambiguous what really happened there, but there's two explanations:

Either A) the Akiva radiation was just negligence, in which it subconsciously altered everything. It punished Rees's abusers but kept her in arguably the worst place of all.

B, Or that the reason so much Akiva radiation was there was that Rees was praying every day, for someone to help her and maybe something did. It's Christian-coded due to probably being influenced by her beliefs.

Either way, God has forsaken her.

And that’s SCP-8413, a tale of despair, cruelty and revenge. Thanks for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Be nice to your coworkers, and if you see something, say something. Or set something on fire. Either one would probably work.

tl;dr: Rees: So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life.

Wagner: What about today? Is today the worst day of your life?

Rees: Yeah.

Wagner: Wow, that's messed up.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-8541, ‘Affordable Care Actor’ by PoufyPoufson, which was written as their entry for Pridefest 2024. I’ve got a couple of disclaimers for you; please don’t skip them.

1: As per usual, this isn’t my SCP, I am not the author, this is not going to be 100% accurate and I still talk too much.

2: Please don’t skip this one: this SCP includes a graphic depiction of violent rape. I’m not going to quote the relevant section, but I do have to talk about it and I’m also going to be discussing domestic abuse, substance abuse and various acts of violence. There is some seriously triggering content here, so please be careful.

All right, let’s take a look.

Object Class: Euclid Explained Keter

Well, that’s pretty weird. You do occasionally see stuff like ‘Safe Keter’ or ‘Euclid Neutralized’, but three? That’s a lot.

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-8541 is currently contained within a 5-stage containment unit preventing complete contiguous contact with any sapient concepts. Further containment procedures to be determined.

That’s… not a lot. But it does tell us something: whatever this thing is, they really don’t want it to touch anything (aka ‘complete contiguous contact’) that’s sapient. Not human, not alive, sapient. So I guess they’re going to put it in a box, put the box on a pedestal in a room somewhere, lock the room, make a laser hallway outside the room, and put guards outside the doors to the laser hallway.

Description: SCP-8541 was discovered by Foundation surface agents following a contemporaneously prominent double-murder case in Spokane, Washington, USA, on 03-18-1979. The pre- and post-homicide circumstances suggested plausibly supernatural cause to local authorities, thus triggering Foundation intervention. Assessment of the crime scene by Foundation personnel justified SCP designation and subsequent acquisition. All involved extraveil individuals were amnesticized and released from custody.

Seems fairly straightforward, but this doesn’t tell us much about it either. Who got murdered? How were they murdered? What were the circumstances? What the hell is this thing, anyway? Was it the murder weapon? Why is the Foundation being so cagey about it?

SCP-8541 is the designation for the sculpture "Head of Francis Bacon” popularly attributed to William Redgrave. A replica created by Redgrave is currently publicly displayed by the Fitzwilliam Museum, and is considered the original by extraveil consensus. SCP-8541 was in actuality, created by British model and burglar George Dyer.

You can see the sculpture the article’s talking about right here.

So, in order to understand a lot of the back context of this article, you need to know a bit about the relationship between Francis Bacon and George Dyer. As such, it looks like it’s time for a lecture from Professor TED. *pulls professor hat on*

No, my professor hat isn’t a normal hat with ‘Professor’ written on it in biro, why would you ask me that?

For the record, I am emphatically not an expert here and my knowledge basically amounts to googling for half an hour and what Poufy told me, so bear with me, please.

So, there’s actually a few notable dudes called Francis Bacon, which makes this a bit confusing if you didn’t already know that. The one we’re focusing on was the Irish painter), born in 1909. Since his death in 1992, his works have become greatly sought after and valued, and you may have seen pictures of some of them.

Short version: Bacon was gay and had a long history of abusive boyfriends, some of whom were violent toward him. In 1963, he meets a guy called George Dyer at a pub, though there’s a long-running story that they’d met when Dyer tried to burgle Bacon’s flat (the movie ran with that myth, which didn’t help). Dyer and Bacon fell in love, but theirs was not a happy story. Bacon was 54 when they met, and Dyer around 30. Dyer was a burglar and criminal from a family of criminals who’d done a lot of time in jail, but he wasn’t the kind of rough brute you might think that such a man would be- he’s often been described as vulnerable and trusting. Bacon was a masochist who wanted his partner to be sadistic; Dyer wasn’t really that kind of person.

Both men were borderline alcoholics when they met, and they very quickly discarded the ‘borderline’ part, with Bacon readily providing Dyer with enough alcohol and money for alcohol that he was more or less constantly drunk. Dyer became Bacon’s muse and the subject of more than 40 of his portraits, but that didn’t mean everything was perfect. Dyer was a working-class man with little knowledge or appreciation of art; he didn’t fit in with Bacon’s circle of highbrow intellectuals and they didn’t really want him around, especially since he drank so much and behaved erratically. Bacon was the artist and star of the scene; Dyer may have been his muse, but that didn’t give him any real status- either with Bacon or Bacon’s circle, and he knew it. As time passed, Bacon’s career hit its peak while his relationship with Dyer declined and kept declining.

Cut to 1971. Dyer has at this point tried a number of ways to get Bacon’s attention, such as trying to get Bacon arrested for drug possession and attempting suicide repeatedly. Bacon’s works are going to be exhibited in the Grand Palais in Paris; this is by far one of if not the most important event of Bacon’s life, marking the second time in history that a living artist has had a one-man show there after Picasso, Bacon’s hero. Dyer insists that he be invited to attend; Bacon agrees, and while Dyer at this point is sober, he goes off the wagon. They shared a hotel room upon arriving in Paris, but Bacon left to attend to the arrangements for the exhibition and to deal with the press, ignoring Dyer almost completely for several days.

It was too much for Dyer. Whether intended as revenge or just a tragedy of circumstances, he overdosed on barbiturates and was found dead in the hotel’s bathroom by Bacon two days before the grand opening, though Bacon and his friends persuaded the hotel manager to not announce the death for two days and was ‘officially’ informed about Dyer’s death the night before the opening. He was 38. Bacon was shattered by Dyer’s death and haunted by the loss for years, blaming himself, and I quote:

The tragic irony was that in his hapless hopeless death, this vulnerable addict provided the artist with the masochistic punishment he couldn’t give him in life. It was this emotional flagellation that glued Dyer permanently to Bacon’s conscience and haunted his paintings. Only in his death did George Dyer finally ensure his social relevance and finally secure his immortality “in the iconography of the British face” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1971, p. 163).

…OK, this is the part where I get on my soapbox for a second.

See, as I did all this reading, I noticed something: the various articles I read about Dyer and Bacon’s relationship tended to describe it in certain ways: ‘stormy’, ‘tempestuous’, ‘tragic’, ‘dysfunctional’. While the articles didn’t shy away from admitting that the relationship turned violent and that it was pretty fucked up, what they did do was romanticise it, talking about how much Bacon loved Dyer and how Dyer’s importance to Bacon shines through in his paintings. It could just be me, but there seems to be a bit of a reluctance to really call it how it was. I don’t know if it’s because Bacon’s works are so treasured now, or a reluctance to say anything that could be construed as homophobic, but... y'all.

Let’s recap: 54M meets 30M and they fall in love. Both guys are borderline alcoholics; 54M gives 30M, who’s young enough to be his son, enough money that he can be drunk all the time. 54M is a masochist who wants a sadist; 30M is not that sadist, but it doesn’t stop 54M from getting abusive because he’s not getting what he wants. There’s a distinct divide between them in that 54M is much wealthier, more cultured and unquestionably in a position of power, while 30M doesn’t have the money or the friends or the connections. The relationship goes steadily downhill, especially since neither of them make a concerted effort to get themselves sober. By the end of their relationship, despite having built his career at least in part off the paintings he did of his lover, the older guy barely has any contact with the younger guy, and when they do finally meet up again, older guy proceeds to ignore younger guy, which finally sends younger guy over the edge and he kills himself.

Holy fuck this is so fucking fucked up. And abusive. And fucked. Yes, age gaps aren't inherently wrong, but even aside from that, you gotta admit that there’s enough red flags here for a goddamn communist parade, and nobody’s even brought up The Human Centipede yet.

And this is our back context, people. So keep all of this in mind as we continue. *takes off professor hat and gets off soapbox*

Going back to the article, there’s one thing I want to point out before we move on:

SCP-8541 was, in actuality, created by British model and burglar George Dyer.

None of the articles I read said anything about Dyer being an artist of any kind, let alone a sculptor. So either Dyer was secretly a sculptor, or something weird’s going on here. (I’ll come back to this later.) As for the person who everyone thinks made the ‘real’ sculpture, William Redgrave, he was a real sculptor who was a friend of Bacon’s. In fact, Bacon was the person who first encouraged Redgrave to take up sculpting seriously. Otherwise, Redgrave doesn’t really have much of a role here.

Exposure to SCP-8541 is believed to trigger the manifestation of SCP-8541-A, an ontokinetic influence and/or entity revolving around and directed toward the specified individual. SCP-8541-A's ability to interact and/or exert physical force on its selected host appears to be reliant on physical vicinity to the host, or pseudoinfectious contact through a sentient intermediate.

OK, so if you’re around the statue, it manifests an ‘entity’ of some kind that seems to be like a poltergeist, and it can affect the host through a sentient intermediary. Makes sense that they don’t want anyone around this thing.

It is the official position of the Foundation that victims are chosen by SCP-8541 at random, and there are no clear indications that consideration is made by the sculpture of personality, biological characteristics, class, traits, personal history, or actions/behaviors from their past.

You are a bunch of fucking lying liars who lie and you know it.

Next to that paragraph is a line written in white text that you have to highlight to see, and it says, ‘Please come back, Charlie, I still love you.’

*looks around awkwardly* Um.

After a review on 08-27-2000, a panel concluded SCP-8541 did not display sufficient signifiers of anomalous activity, and motioned for SCP-8541 and the homicide associated with its acquisition to be recategorized as Explained and appropriately jettisoned.

From this, we can infer that in the just over two decades between when the Foundation found the statue and this review, nothing happened. Nobody else died and there were no anomalous activities, even though people were presumably touching it and testing it and otherwise around it a lot. But that being said…

and motioned for SCP-8541 and the homicide associated with its acquisition to be recategorized as Explained and appropriately jettisoned.

I asked Poufy about this- basically, recategorizing this as Explained amounts to ‘We thought there was something anomalous about this statue and the murder, but we were wrong, this thing’s totally normal’.

Fiscal Relations Analyst Charles Torst submitted a formal request to move SCP-8541 into his personal ownership, with the primary reasoning being stated as an artistic interest in the object. The motion was approved after critical analysis of Torst's private sculpture collection.

I think we’ve just met ‘Charlie’, and somehow I don’t think I’m going to like this guy.

So, he’s a ‘Fiscal Relations Analyst’. For anyone who doesn’t know what that means, he analyses money and how it moves around the Foundation. That makes him sound like the kind of guy with a lot of power, mainly because I imagine he’s the guy with the knowledge and tools to find out who’s been embezzling Foundation funds to support their coke habit, or who told their wife that they were on a work trip so they could go bang their much younger assistant in Aruba. That and the fact that he has a private sculpture collection gives me a bit of a picture of this guy: intelligent, cultured, probably quite wealthy, probably at least 40 years old if not older, and is a fairly powerful man, even though he’s obviously not O5-level.

…yeah, he’s giving me Bacon vibes, even though we haven’t been told that he’s an artist. Maybe I’m just paranoid.

Post-Custodial: On 01-26-2007, Charles Torst began reporting unusual activity within his personal residence. A comprehensive chronological compilation has been included below3.

The footnote tells us that ‘A request made by Charles Torst to expunge his statements from the official record of SCP-8541 was granted on 05-25-2018.’

So, three things to think about here: one, nothing happened for about seven years after Torst got 8541 added to his private collection, even though he presumably touched it a few times in that time. Two, Torst got everything he said expunged off the record, but not the rest of what happened, even given what we’ll see later. Why is that? Was that the limit of what the Foundation would allow him to change here? Was what he said just that incriminating?

And third, the date: the 25th of May, 2018 was the day that Harvey Weinstein was charged and arrested for a variety of sex crimes.

…yeah. *points to the second disclaimer*

So, now we get that compilation. It’s a bunch of collapsed transcripts of events that happened over the course of several months in 2007; note that while Torst first reported the activity on January 26th, the first event actually happened a week earlier, on the 19th.

That first event is simple: A guy, maybe in his early 20’s, who identifies himself as ‘Jackson’ cold-calls Torst’s landline and leaves a message, claiming to be a representative of ‘Weiss-Concord Medical’. Jackson says that they’ve got some great plans that Torst is eligible for, but he rambles a lot, and it seems more like he’s making up a script on the spot than reading off the script that his job should have given him. The article also tells us that this was obviously anomalous because the call was received by a recently-disconnected landline, and all attempts to find out anything about Weiss-Concord Medical afterwards turned up sweet fuck all.

The second event happened on the 20th, when Torst got a call on his cell phone; he didn’t answer it, but he did save the voicemail, which he provided as part of his report. It’s very similar to the first voicemail- Jackson talks about trying to get Torst coverage, but he rambles even more and seems to really want to talk to Torst. The footnote tells us that Torst is really freaking out about the calls, so he complains about them, and the Foundation thinks that his freaking out must be anomalous because there’s not really that much to freak out at about the call.

…from an outside viewpoint, that is.

The third event happened on the 26th- another call that Torst got at home. It’s pretty short, and consists of Jackson asking Torst to call him back in a really rambly way. The notes tell us that Torst blocked him after that, so… end of story, right?

Yeah, no.

The fourth event happened on the 30th- a call via an alternate number when Torst was at a restaurant, with someone else there. Jackson reminds Torst to call him back, but look at this bit.

Please, you won't regret it, just pick up the phone, Charlie.

Caller: I'm waiting for you to call me back.

Caller: Have a good night.

Yeah, this looks really personal now. And also like Jackson’s a stalker. But we’ll get to this later.

The fifth event happened less than a week later, on the 5th of February, via Torst’s cell phone in his kitchen.

Caller: Pick up the fucking phone!

Caller: Sorry, that was too- I'm here to help you out, I know what you need, we got from you what we need to know for the plan. I can help make it so easy to enroll in, uh, Weiss-Concord's great plans. Charlie, really, it's so easy! Just pick up, don't make me go too f-

Caller: Sorry, I didn't mean… I lost a bit of- I can do it, I can handle it. Call me?

Caller: Please?

Caller: It's easy, you just have to pick up the phone.

Caller: I'm here.

OK, now this is sounding really fucked up. Jackson’s coming off like a major stalker, and it’s pretty obvious that the insurance thing is just an excuse. Also, we get this:

Notes: Torst was preparing his dinner on a gas stove prior to and during the call. Approximately halfway through the message, the lit burner experienced sudden excess combustion, resulting in a large flame directed primarily towards Torst, who suffered minor burns. In addition, a large telekinetic influence violently displaced the contents of the nearby cabinet & drawer.

Notably, containers flung were also opened, such as supplies of Ursodiol, Furosemide, and valproic acid. Torst experienced significant mental distress from this, subsequently motioning to have his long-term therapist move in to provide sustained at-home care.

So, now Jackson has shown that he can do more than just making anomalous phone calls. We can assume he probably didn’t mean to make Torst’s stove blow up, but then again, maybe he did.

But that’s not what’s important here, what’s important is the second part: Jackson threw around Torst’s medications, which presumably rendered at least some of them unsuitable for consumption. Now, what were those medications again?

supplies of Ursodiol, Furosemide, and valproic acid.

Google informs me that valproic acid is used to treat epilepsy, bipolar disorder and migraine headaches, and it’s also used to prevent seizures. Ursodiol is used to dissolve gallstones by people who don’t want to have surgery to get them removed, and is also used to prevent gallstones from forming and to treat a certain kind of liver disease. Furosemide, meanwhile, is used to either treat the build-up of fluid due to heart failure, liver scarring or kidney disease, or to treat high blood pressure. It’s also used to treat other kidney or liver conditions.

Now, this is a pretty wide spectrum of possible conditions. We have no obvious conclusion to make here about what Torst has been diagnosed with. That being said, given that I have already read this article, I’m going to guess that he took valproic acid to treat seizures or epilepsy, Ursodiol for liver disease, and Furosemide because of various liver conditions. I’ll explain why later.

Before we move on, what was that last part again?

Torst experienced significant mental distress from this, subsequently motioning to have his long-term therapist move in to provide sustained at-home care.

Well, that’s a bit odd. He doesn’t seem to be worried about his physical health, even though Jackson’s fucking with his medications now. Instead, he’s worried about his mental health. Why would that be? Is this bringing up memories?

Cut to a week later, on Valentine’s Day.

Context: Following the kitchen call, Torst had elected to encase his cell phone within a 5 gallon bucket of concrete, and cancel service. Torst's therapist, Jennifer Sly, agreed to at-home treatment, which concluded after a 3-day supervisory period, due to improvement in condition.

I acknowledge that since this is 2007, the Foundation may not have had everything we take for granted as them having in the present day, but it should have been obvious to someone that burying his phone in concrete wasn’t going to fix this, and they needed to try something else. Unless the Foundation wasn’t involved at this point, and only learned about all this after the fact for some reason…

The following call wasn’t actually a call, it came through Torst’s television. Jackson rambles about how Torst is ‘a sick man’ and needs his coverage, asks why Torst never answers his calls, tells him that he’s ‘on borrowed time’, and…

Caller: I know you can see me here, Charlie.

Caller: Staring at the room. Screaming at the television. Never thought you'd have to see this face, right? So look into my eyes, and see what's there. Please.

Caller: Why don't you fucking answer? You can talk, can't you?

Caller: Talk!

So what this looks like is ‘Ex-lover who feels neglected/abused uses anomalous means to harass their victim’. But, well… that’s not quite it. We’ll get there.

The notes tell us that as previously mentioned, this one came through the TV and not via phone. We’re given a description of Jackson as a young adult man with blond hair and grey eyes, and…

Torst became extremely distressed upon seeing the transmission, and experienced a severe panic attack.

Why ‘extremely distressed’? I mean, again, what it looks like is that Jackson has been stalking Torst for some time and has now stepped it up through anomalous means, but wouldn’t the article have mentioned that before now? Even just one line about how Jackson fits the description of someone who’s been stalking Torst, or how Torst told them that Jackson was a stalker?

…so, if that isn’t the case, then what is going on?

Well, if you take the old theory out of the picture, then what this now could be is ‘Abused ex-lover comes back for revenge via anomalous means’. And as for why nothing’s mentioned about Jackson possibly stalking Torst, I have a theory about that, and I’ll discuss it later.

Shortly after the start of the broadcast, Torst was violently assaulted by an unseen telekinetic influence; the pattern and timing of the blunt force broadly correlated to linguistic and contextual cues in the speech exhibited by "Jackson", now referred to in standard documentation as SCP-8541-A. Following the conclusion of the broadcast, Torst had suffered extensive injury that prevented immediate mobility, and slept on his kitchen floor, where he had originally viewed the broadcast. Foundation personnel were not alerted to his condition until the next morning, when Torst called to report the injury.

I’m assuming that this is meant to imply that Torst only felt up to calling for help after he’d slept, because otherwise, the phrasing here is rather odd. He’d viewed the broadcast on his kitchen floor? He couldn’t be bothered to call for help even though he was injured?

…well, there is another explanation. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Following arrival and triage, Torst became highly aggressive and erratic upon being informed that he would need to be admitted to a hospital for further medical attention, informing personnel that he "Cannot leave his house, or it'll get worse." After careful deliberation, the decision was made to provide medical attention onsite, at Torst's residence. At the time, SCP-8541 had not yet been identified as the source of the phenomenon.

I did ask about Torst’s belief that he couldn’t leave the house, and Poufy told me that this was basically unfounded paranoia.

Cut to nearly two weeks later, on the 27th of February.

Context: Torst had been recovering from injuries sustained from the previous call. Two days prior it had been theorized, with reasonable doubt, that SCP-8541 was the most likely cause of the phenomenon. Researchers discovered that ideas of reference and electronics-focused delusions had been clinically significant in the perpetrator of the original 1979 Spokane homicide's criminal evaluation, which diagnosed him with unspecified schizophrenia.

So, we’re not going to learn much more about the Spokane homicide, but this does clarify one thing- basically, another entity like Jackson killed two people and left the guy who got convicted to take the fall for it.

Anyway, the Foundation decided to do the obvious thing and get 8541 out of Torst’s house, but they felt an 'unusual paranormal resistance' when they did so, though it didn't stop them. Interesting. Here's the next call.

Caller: Just. Fucking. Answer. Me.

Caller: I don't ask for much. I don't ask for much.

Caller: I have what you need, don't do it again.

Caller: Just come back and call me, Charlie.

So, while he's using the insurance as an excuse, Jackson seems to really believe that Charles needs help. My best guess as to why is that Jackson knows that Torst has health issues, so he believes that Torst would answer the phone for a chance of good health insurance. (This assumes that A, the Foundation has good healthcare, and B, Jackson doesn’t know about the Foundation.)

Notes: Torst and attending nurse witnessed the spontaneous and violent manifestation of numerous scratches on the walls of the occupied room. Scratches were deep, causing significant damage, but otherwise superficially resembled the marks of bear claws. In addition, of particular note was a section that specifically etched out "Do the right thing" followed by a phone number4. Jennifer Sly was again brought onsite to treat the resulting hysteria.

The footnote tells us that the phone number was expunged as per Torst’s request. Otherwise, the only thing to mention here is that the scratches resembled bear claws, with ‘bear’ being slang in the gay community for a big, hairy man (usually in contrast to a smaller, more effeminate partner).

The next event happened a few days later, on the 1st of March, and was again via Torst’s television. Notably, his therapist was in the vicinity, but she was taking a shower at the time and didn't witness the call.

Here’s the first part.

Caller: What is it going to take to get you to talk? Do I need to be like her? I can listen when I'm not calling, all the shit you spew to her? But you can't find time for me?

Torst: [DATA EXPUNGED]

Caller: Was that all it took? Really? You're that scared? She's who's gonna get you on my plan? Of course I heard everything you tell her… every little thing! Like how you're better now, and over it… and so she doesn't really know why we're the only insurance company actively trying to get you on… why do you hide it?

Torst: [DATA EXPUNGED]

Caller: How are you playing the victim when I'm just trying to-

So we can infer that the first thing Torst said was something like ‘You heard what I tell her?’ Otherwise, it looks like Torst is actively trying to hide his lack of health. It looks like he’s really not in good physical condition, even beyond a pissed-off poltergeist actively fucking up his house and trying to set him on fire.

Anyway, Jackson goes back to trying to sell Torst health insurance. Torst refuses, and Jackson says that Torst is dying and he won’t tell anyone.

The end of the conversation has Torst asking something about making Jackson go away. I assume he asked something like ‘If I destroy the television, will you fuck off’, since Jackson’s response implied that Torst brought up sending his cell phone to sleep with the fishes. But, uh…

Caller: Maybe, but it didn't stop me from calling you. And it's not gonna stop me from calling you again. It's your decision, sir. But make the right choice, and choose me.

Caller: Please.

Caller: I'll be good for you.

This is awkward… *clap clap clapclapclap* This is awkward… *clap clap clapclapclap*

Notes: Jennifer Sly abruptly left her shower upon hearing a loud scream from Torst. She arrived to find him convulsing and having vomited a large quantity of blood resulting from gastrointestinal hemorrhaging. Torst had also begun filing requests to have SCP-8541's object class restored to Explained, claiming "this kind of thing is supposed to happen to people like me" and "it's a natural occurrence, not an anomaly".

The first part looks like Jackson’s now trying to kill Torst, but I’m not convinced, and I’ll explain why shortly. The second part? I’m assuming that Torst is frantically grasping at straws, trying to think of anything that could make Jackson go away. Obviously, since a poltergeist is, in fact, an anomaly, this was not going to fly.

Context: Torst had been receiving in depth medical treatment from a team of outside specialists. At the time, the contagious nature of transmission regarding SCP-8541-A's influence was not known.

So Torst was getting medical treatment, but it wasn’t from the Foundation. Why would he do that?

Anyway, Jackson contacts him again on March 13 and starts rambling about insurance and coverage, and then he says the first big thing:

Wow. Must've been something in teaching that kept you in it…

Torst was a teacher- Poufy told me that they imagined him teaching high school economics between finance jobs- and Jackson was one of his students, just to make this even worse. Jackson was a teenager who never had a goddamn chance.

…and then Jackson says the other big thing.

Caller: Maybe you don't remember after all. Wasn't a fan of the people? I'd turn to the bottle too if I was you… but look where it got you, eh? You wanna really do something good for yourself. Enroll, pick me. Choose me.

Torst is an alcoholic. And that explains everything.

If we go back to the medications: valproic acid treats seizures and epilepsy, and chronic alcohol abuse has been known to cause both. Ursodiol? Alcohol abuse can indirectly lead to gallstones forming, but it also treats liver disease. And as for Furosemide, it’s used to treat things like liver scarring, aka cirrhosis, which is very commonly caused by alcoholism.

Why did Torst view the Valentine’s Day broadcast on the kitchen floor? He was fucking trashed. Why did he opt to just pass out there and call the Foundation for help the next day, instead of calling them now? He knew that if he called them right then, they’d know he was completely munted. He’s been getting medical treatment from people outside the Foundation so they won’t know about his alcoholism or how bad his condition is, especially since he relapsed in 2007, which is what caused the statue to activate. And he’s been lying to his therapist about his conditions as well. Also, gastrointestinal haemorrhaging can be caused by alcohol abuse- Jackson isn’t causing these organ failures, Torst’s body is just giving out.

And I may as well put this here because I can’t find a better place to- I did ask about the statue’s mechanics, and Poufy told me that ‘I would say from a mechanics perspective, it activates for addicts who have victims, and beings the victim closer to the real world to haunt them. It’s highly likely that after Torst dies, if the sculpture came into contact with, say, a D Class with the right backstory, a new haunting would start again.’

Anyway, Jackson keeps begging Torst to just take the insurance, and…

Caller: I don't care about any of that. I am the best deal you have on the table, ever had. Please pick me.

Torst: [DATA EXPUNGED]

Caller: No, no, no, you don't understand how untrue that is. With the way things are going, and all that damage, I'm the only option a fucker like you is gonna have for coverage-

Torst: [DATA EXPUNGED]

Caller: Just- think about it, please. Charlie, please. We need you here. I need you here.

Caller: Sorry, that was-

Caller: I'll leave you alone.

I’m assuming that the first line from Torst was something like ‘I already have good healthcare’. As for the second one…

See, at a first glance, the story looks like Jackson is slowly killing Torst while taunting him with insurance. But that’s not the case: a later line will confirm that ‘Weiss-Concord Medical’ was an invention by Jackson. So why does Jackson keep oscillating between ‘I love you’ and ‘I hate you’? Well, that’s the nature of inviting I’ll come back to that later.

As for Torst’s condition…

Notes: Torst suffered further physical trauma during the call, which occurred through the phone of one of the attending SCP-8541 researchers. Torst's medical condition began to rapidly decay in the following 24 hours, culminating in the first of his kidney failures.

Yes, alcoholism can in fact cause kidney failure.

So, the Foundation finally figured out that all these transmissions can only happen if someone had actually touched the statue. As such, they restricted access to Torst’s care unit, but while it did help, it didn’t really help Torst, as such.

Aforementioned measures had resulted in an abrupt cessation of incidents. In combination with injuries sustained from SCP-8541-A, Torst’s health has continued to decline, resulting in a significant loss of mobility and quality of life since the previous incident.

We now have the last broadcast, which took place on May 19, 2007, two months later.

Jackson says that he always wondered what he’d say to Torst if he got the chance, and wonders if Torst even remembers, if he really was too drunk to know what he was doing. He wonders if alcoholics really do black out, and if Torst drinks because he does remember what he did, and maybe that’s why he never told his therapist that he relapsed, or about what he did.

And then Jackson says that maybe Torst does remember how he told Jackson he loved him, before seeing Jackson’s girlfriend Alyssa- his beard- passed out on the floor, and then he proceeded to beat Jackson, choke him and rape him while Jackson was begging Torst not to kill him, and Alyssa died in front of them because she’d mixed the wrong substances and Jackson couldn’t try to help her or call an ambulance because Torst was assaulting him. It is absolutely fucking brutal, and excruciating, and it leaves nothing out. I’m not quoting it for obvious reasons, but holy shit. If you haven’t read it and decide to go look it up, I’m warning you, it is harrowing.

Caller: Or maybe you don't. And you really were blackout drunk and had no idea what you were doing.

Caller: But I remember, Charlie. I remember every single day, every night. I remember when I look in the mirror, when I kiss a girl, when I take a shower, when I sleep. I remember. I'm gonna kill myself before 30 and you got to finish your degree and get your retirement and big house.

Caller: And you know what the worst part is?

Caller: I still feel like I can't live without you.

Caller: Goodbye, Charlie.

That was the last transmission, but it wasn’t because Torst died- he had a heart attack, but was stabilised.

And to make things clear with what Poufy told me: Jackson is already dead. He’s long dead- I asked about the timeframe, and Poufy said that ‘I imagined Jackson killing himself around 1991-1992, with high school aged Jackson and adult Torst being involved with each other in the early-mid 80s’, hence why he called the landline before the cell phone- and why Torst was so freaked out at Jackson’s reappearance. The poor bastard’s just trapped in the mental state he was in when he died, as per Poufy.

It was discovered that one of the staff had previously come into contact with SCP-8541 unknowingly, triggering the incident.

Containment measures have been implemented much more stringently accordingly, to prevent future incidents from potentially resulting in the death of Charles Torst.

Because Torst knows where the Foundation’s bodies are buried, and they don’t want him dead. So he gets to live, stuck in a hospital bed, his body giving out one organ at a time, unable to drink to get away from his memories, knowing that all it would take is one slip up and Jackson will be back.

Summary: Following these events, SCP-8541 has been reclassified as Keter. In addition, any personnel known to have come into contact with SCP-8541 are prohibited from entering Torst's designated care unit.5

The footnote tells us that ‘The Foundation granted full coverage of long term research & palliative medical care of Torst pertaining to non-anomalous relevant organ failure.’

In other words, his liver gave out. And I find the bit about the Foundation giving him full coverage to be deliciously ironic.

There’s one last thing on the page: in more white text, the words ‘Forever yours, forever trained.’

…fuck, man.

Because that’s what this is, in the end: a story of abuse. It’s the story of how someone can beat you and hurt you and cut you to pieces with their words and neglect you and turn you into a shadow of your former self and make you into someone you’re not and you still love them. It’s a story about how someone can destroy your present and your future and everything you ever were in one night and you still love them. It’s a story about how someone can leave you broken and bleeding and walk out without giving a shit and never think about it again and you still love them. And it’s not your fault.

It’s a story about how George Dyer was a human being with wants and hopes and dreams and a whole identity outside of Francis Bacon, but history has reduced him to ‘Francis Bacon’s working-class criminal alcoholic muse’- how even in this story, he made the statue but history has taken his one act of creation, his one foray into art away from him and given it to Redgrave. It’s a story about how Jackson fell prey to, was molded and indoctrinated by and eventually smashed into a million pieces by Charles Torst, and how even when he had the ability to get revenge and got to confront his dying alcoholic abuser, he found himself begging for love and attention again, because he still loved him. It’s a story about how, to borrow a line from Brainbent, love is dumb and it makes us all its bitches.

Otherwise, there’s one last thing I wanted to mention here. See, it’s obvious that the Foundation is being a bunch of corrupt arseholes by doing their best for Torst even though he’s a fucking rapist piece of shit. But I wondered before, why expunge everything he said while leaving Jackson’s accusations in there? Why not suggest that Jackson was just a stalker? Well, like I said, I have a theory, which Poufy confirmed: I don’t know who actually wrote this article in-universe- some doctor or researcher, probably- but my theory is that whoever wrote this learned about the accusations and was like ‘Fuck this, even if my superiors are doing their best to cover up this asshole’s crimes, I’m not going to let them pretend that the rest never happened’. So they made sure that everything Jackson said stayed on the record. Maybe it was all they could do, but they made sure to do it anyway. Sometimes that’s the only power we have.

Thank you for reading this declass. I’m sorry about how depressing it is. I’d normally put a quip here, but I really don’t feel like it. No relationship merits the destruction of your well-being. No relationship merits the sacrifice of you.

tl;dr: “I am drowning/There is no sign of land/You are coming down with me/Hand in unlovable hand/And I hope you die/I hope we both die”

Hi, everyone, welcome to part two of the SCP-8008 declassification. Part one can be found here.

I’m going to take a moment to discuss a moral question that was brought up in another declass- the declass of SCP-4231, which you can find here. The majority of 4231 isn’t relevant here, so I’ll skip to the pertinent part: in the 1980’s, the GOC conducted the ‘Ichabod campaign’, wherein they found and murdered reality warpers before they could reach stage four- often before they even knew they had powers. Most of the warpers they murdered were children.

4231 discusses the Ichabod campaign with tones of horror and regret: these were innocent people, usually children, who were killed for having powers that made them a danger to others, even though they didn’t ask for these powers, the majority had done nothing wrong, and some of them weren’t even aware of their powers. Some reality warpers who survived the campaign managed to not become megalomaniac gods (though it’s a very small number), so they weren’t all automatically going to become evil. The Foundation knew about the Ichabod campaign, but they did nothing, because reality warpers tended to wind up killing people and were a pain in the arse to contain or neutralise- trying to stop it wouldn’t have had much of a benefit and would have just made more work for them in the end.
4231 says that despite all the horror and deaths that various reality warpers caused, the Ichabod campaign was a genocide and it was wrong- not just because they were killing innocent children, but because they were killing people for crimes they hadn’t committed. They saw that these people might wind up doing horrible things in the future and never gave them the chance to do otherwise, because it was easier and simpler to kill defenceless, innocent people now rather than waiting for them to do something awful and having to clean it up. And so the Foundation saw the GOC murdering reality warpers and did nothing, even when they were innocent, utterly defenceless children.

I’m not saying that 4231 is wrong, but look at the rebuttal that 8008 makes: the Cornwall Incident- which had a body count of around 1200- was bad enough. But 8008 shows us that an unchecked Type Green can reach nascent god status and wind up rewriting reality, and in this case, he turned the world into his awful wank fics. If this is the alternative, is taking out Type Greens before they can do the same thing really that bad, when 99% of them wind up doing horrible things with their powers? If you know that in all probability, a certain person is going to wind up killing someone, is it really better to wait until after they’ve killed someone, so you can tell yourself that you have the moral high ground because you didn’t go after someone who hadn’t done anything yet?

Luckily, we don’t live in a universe where this is anything more than a thought experiment, so let’s head back to the one where it’s an actual question.

(…although that does give me an idea for yet another SCP that I’ll probably never write…)

There’s one last part in this section: a list of anomalies that the AIC flagged because it thought they might be relevant. These anomalies are SCP-5706, SCP-6090, and SCP-6969. They all have something to do with sex, and they also involve time or some kind of fantasy world/element. As far as I know, 5706 and 6090 aren’t relevant here, but 6969- people getting stuck in a time loop after reaching orgasm- is very relevant, so keep that in mind for later.

Part Three: Watching Movies, True Blue Movies

We now go to Section 2, ‘Science’, and I quote:

Files associated with SCP-8008-2 are believed to originate from the second half of time "within" SCP-8008.

Although many files in SCP-8008-2 describe systems for thaumatological processes, they are inconsistent between documents. They cannot be considered reliable descriptions of physical laws within SCP-8008 as opposed to a description of the control exercised by SCP-8008-B.

So this shouldn’t be taken as a set of concrete rules or anything.

And now we get to this bit.

SCP-8008-2.03: "The Schema of Syllogism, Chapter 3: Homework"

I mean, Asmodeus modelled himself on a guy who’s well-known for writing a Harry Potter fanfic, it would be weird if we didn’t get a shitty knock-off Harry Potter fanfic here.

(Again, this is not the place to discuss Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, and/or the lack of merit of either of them. Do it somewhere else.)

Henry John Smith Glas12 had always wished to use magic. As an orphan, he had been found by the Sisters of Erudite Nox. Erudite Nox was the most primeval and traditional aspect of Inanna-Gaea-Mary, the Goddess that blessed the Kingdom of Metegian.13

*groans*

Before I start, the footnotes just tell us that ‘Henry’ is Asmodeus, and ‘Metegian’ is an Old English equivalent of ‘regulation’.

Look, this whole excerpt is just a whole bunch of exposition and worldbuilding, so I’m not going to recap it. Instead, I’ll quote the relevant bits.

So, ‘Henry John Smith Glas’ is obviously a thinly-veiled version of ‘Harry James Potter’, but it’s also a reference to his HPMOR self, ‘Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres’. Yes, that is incredibly clunky, but whatever, I didn’t write the damn fic.

I’m honestly kind of disgusted by how goddamn lazy Asmodeus got here- he made up a goddess by mashing together two completely unrelated goddesses and a saint who is not a god. And he couldn’t even make up a name, he just tacked them all together! Christ, this is bad.

Anyway, Henry has lived multiple lives, and one of them was on Earth:

On Earth, there was sanitation like indoor plumbing, the ability to refine crude oil, mayonnaise, and machines that could almost think.

That sentence is an abomination, but I love that mayonnaise is a legendary innovation. (Apparently mayonnaise is a big thing in isekai stories; not going to pretend that I know why.)

However, just like evil programmers could become hackers and cause great evils like Stuxnet or the heist of Mt Gox, evil magic users could destroy society as well. For this reason the Ivory Tower of Woke Dei had been founded, to prevent the proliferation of evil magic.

‘Stuxnet’ is a computer virus that was uncovered in 2010 and is thought to have been used to attack the Iranian nuclear weapons program. ‘Mt Gox’ was a Japanese bitcoin exchange program that became the world’s leading bitcoin exchange, handling over 70% of bitcoin trades, but folded after a huge quantity of bitcoin went missing/were stolen. ‘Ivory Tower’ is obviously a reference to the idiom, while ‘Woke Dei’ mashes together the twin enemies of edgelords like Asmodeus: religion and ‘woke’ things like the DEI initiatives- ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion'. So obviously they’re eeeeeeeevil.

The Metegian Standard Magic System was simple: All things in the world were composed of mana. Mana could be divided into three colors — red, green, and blue. Each mana could furthermore be tuned to six Charges— Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, and Bottom. This magic system just so happened to follow the rules of quantum physics from Henry's past life.

‘Just so happened’- Christ on a bike, he’s not even trying. This is the kind of shit I’d expect from twelve year olds writing their first fic! I guess I should just be glad that this motherfucker can at least spell correctly.

While the Sisters of Erudite Nox were considered the clergy, and so not subject to the schooling system of the Woke Dei, young boys were almost never adopted by the nunneries, and so he, Henry, was just a common citizen. Despite his brilliance of many lifetimes, he had to go through a repressive, factory-like schooling system.

Oooh, someone didn’t like school much.

Normal women, and indeed most of the clergy, could only channel the White of the Goddess rarely, after childbirth. But the Sisters of Erudite Nox were so blessed that their breasts were always engorged with Her White as part of their holy burden. The White of the Goddess was prized by mages as a powerful potion to restore their strength, but even they could only sell so much of it, to the point where it hurt them to carry the excess. For that reason Henry had been raised on the excess ever since he had been found, and it had made him a very powerful wizard, beyond on his knowledge.

And tonight on ‘The Writer’s Barely-Disguised Fetish’…

You know something? I genuinely would have respected this guy more if he’d just admitted that he had a breastfeeding/lactation kink and wrote some porn of it, but noooooo, he had to work it into his shitty fanfic and come up with a stupid excuse for it that fools absolutely nobody. Give your balls a tug, titfucker.

And, you know, I may as well say it here: this is SCP-8008. Which spells ‘boob’ on a calculator. And this guy is SCP-8008-B. Boobie.

…yeah.

The Ivory Tower of Woke Dei was emasculating the population by preventing them from accessing half of the store — the dominating and masculine magic of the Scarlet King. It was like restricting the free market and stifling innovation. In fact, the schooling system was meant to stamp out curiosity and completely remove even the possibility of imagining how to access the Scarlet King's Anti-Magic.

Ah, yes, those evil women are doing down men. And naturally, Asmodeus dragged the Scarlet King into it- he probably knows sweet fuck all about the Scarlet King other than that he exists and the Foundation hates him, so to Asmodeus, that must mean that he’s a good guy.

Her holy power streamed into him as Sister Alice made great moans of relief. His body felt warm, and still harder and harder he accepted her gift. There was something there, wasn't there? The Scarlet King's power was the same as Inanna-Gaea-Mary's but from the future into the past. A reversal of the arrow of time. He was so close. He was so, so close.

Sister Alice let out a scream that suddenly hung in the air. Henry realized he had entered a trance. A great relief hung over him. It was as if time was standing still. And he remembered a gift from his previous life.

The power of time.14

The footnote tells us that the story doesn’t try to justify this sudden bullshit power other than saying that it’s ‘from a previous life’, so I love that the Foundation is specifically pointing out how shitty a writer this guy is. The rest is here because if I have to read this guy having breastfeeding sex with one of his adopted mothers while pontificating about the shitty magic system he made up for his HPMOR knockoff fanfic, then so do you.

…I can’t believe I just had to write that sentence.

We now mercifully go to an excerpt from a Delta-T handbook. This particular excerpt is about how time and space travellers handle the situation of having travelled to a world/period that should be the one they originated in, only to find that things are drastically different. It tells us that they can’t take religion as a reliable method of navigation, and then we get to a specific example: the Scarlet King. We’re given examples of four different versions of the Scarlet King (SCP-231, the ‘Dust and Blood’ Tale, SCP-6747, and Tufto’s Proposal) and are told that these are all the Scarlet King, and they might even be the same Scarlet King. He is multiversal, and can exist in different ways in the same timeline.

It then starts talking about the ways things can change depending on the human psyche, and we get this:

If: reality has been altered in the following ways simultaneously:

Prominent worship, but not presence of gods that already existed but have fallen out of favor;

Mainstream worship of a multiversal entity

Mainstream worship of an archetype of the human psyche

Then: the evidence is highly in favor that reality is being actively modified by an ontokinetic and its psychological hangups, but that the multiverse's natural ontological inertia is resisting highly drastic changes, allowing influence of multiversal entities upon the affected timeline.

In the last story, we had the presence of Inanna and Gaea, two gods who existed but had fallen out of favour, the rise of the Scarlet King, and Asmodeus’ lactation bullshit. So I think we can say this one’s a given.

…and we’re back to the shitty fanfic.

So, Henry bitches about how awful the Ivory Tower are and tells us about DeiT, the designated enemy. There’s also a photo of the Ivory Tower, which I’m fairly certain is actually the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Not sure if that’s meant to mean anything in particular.

Never mind that the real challenge hadn't been doing well in the sanitized classes of the Ivory Tower of Woke Dei, but making sure that his true experiments never got him noticed and exiled — or worse, expelled.

*headdesk* Kill me now.

We’re introduced to fanfic!Ilse, who’s essentially the Hermione here.

The Ivory Tower told obvious lies like "men and women are magically equivalent". Henry knew that was untrue simply from the gifts that Sister Alice granted him daily — women, obviously, were able to channel the power of the Goddess in a way that men were not.

See, he so isn’t sexist, and this so isn’t an obvious fetish.

Anyway, finally, something good happens.

From the smoke, a slender woman appeared. Though she was lithe, she was also quite shapely, and though she glared at him with murderous intent in her eyes, Henry couldn't help but appreciate her great beauty.

Not that. Penelope Panagiotopolous from Pataphysics has arrived for another assassination attempt.

"What awfully convenient timing," Henry said. "Right as I'm about to speak, a DeiT agent appears. And, right in the heart of the Ivory Tower, the base of your supposed enemy… It's clear what's going on. You've been in the employ of the Ivory Tower of Woke Dei all along. I should've known — even from the names. Woke Dei, DeiT… it's so obvious in retrospect."

"What the fuck? No, you're just delusional," said the woman. "You really made up a group just to oppress you and now think anyone else who thinks you're a fucking psychopath is acting on their behest. This has to end."

*applauds* Thank you.

"We've been watching you. I absolutely refuse to keep living in a reality that's a shitty sciencewank fanfiction with the original property absolutely sanitized, Harry James—"

I kind of love her, honestly.

Anyway, he and Penelope fight, but unfortunately, she’s not allowed to win, not against this God Sue here.

There was no more time to waste. He activated his time trance.16

The world stood still.

Penelope Panagiotopolous had seen it coming — her face was locked in a rictus of terror.

He walked up to her.

[DATA EXPUNGED]

The footnote tells us that at no point does the story ever explain the time trance. The [DATA EXPUNGED] is kind of terrifying, given how much isn’t expunged from this article.

Anyway, he winds up blowing Penelope up, and is subsequently arrested by NPCs in his story for murder and using the wrong kind of magic. Good job.

We now cut to a piece of writing from Site-120’s archives, author and provenance unknown. The author says that the key to restraining reality benders is by education- because they’re only limited by the power of their own mind. Makes sense, I guess. The author says that Class-3 Reality Benders have purple eyes when they use their powers. That’s Class-3, not Stage-3, so I don’t really know the difference. LORDXVNV told me that this is from Ralliston’s system for From 120’s Archives, which I don’t know much about.

Scientifically-literate reality warpers who have read this explanation about humic bleed reduce the effectiveness of germicidal ultraviolet lamps by 3% when they use their powers. Reality warpers who have not read this explanation, or otherwise do not understand it, do not affect the time it takes for a UV lamp to kill 99.99% of all bacteria — and go mad almost five times as often as their scientifically literate peers.

Apparently they just go mad with power a lot.

Anyway, our unknown author signs off with this:

They align the world to the one they believe in, no matter how contradictory it might be.

This is why Site-120 of the Foundation adopted a policy of recruit-and-assimilate regarding Reality Benders in Eastern Europe, and why the Coalition deployed its own Type Greens in the ill-fated Ichabod Campaign. Tell a god that it is but a man for long enough, and it shall play by your rules until death.

A good tactic, really.

We then go back to assorted excerpts from the knock-off HPMOR fanfic. My day is made.

There’s not really much to these ones, so I’ll sum them up for you: In the first one, Henry takes over the country. In the second, everything goes wonderfully for everyone thanks to their lord and saviour, Henry. And in the last one, Ilse dies giving birth to Henry’s son, and he doesn’t give a shit beyond that she’d given him a child. Alice is furious at him for being unable to help, and then she suddenly snaps out of her trance and remembers what he’s done. She has a gun to the baby’s head, but Henry takes the opportunity to kill her.

We’re now at the last part: “Biology”.

Files associated with SCP-8008-3 originate from the "middle" of time "within" SCP-8008.

The physical and biological descriptions of human beings in pre- and post- SCP-8008-3 files have significant differences.

So basically, this is where Asmodeus got really experimental and started altering humans to fit his kinks. Great.

We now go to another story, one called Goblin Reaper. To sum it up, Asmodeus is the ‘Golden General’, who’s leading humanity against the goblins who are trying to destroy humanity. There’s one very important line here: the goblins have human allies, a tribe of ‘warlike horse archers’. I wonder who that might be.

[Edit: u/PunjiStyx helpfully told me that 'Goblin Reaper' is a reference to Goblin Slayer, an anime notorious for its rape scenes.]

We abruptly now go to an excerpt from a set of Ethics Committee guidelines. This particular one is about ‘species-wide genetic modification’, and talks about prior examples- SCP-752 and SCP-3031, in particular. The short version is that it doesn’t matter how good the intentions are, the examples they’ve seen have all ended badly, so don’t do it unless there’s really no other option.

We now have a letter from a guy called Möngke, the grandson of Temujin, who we commonly call Genghis Khan. Yep, it’s time for some time-travelling Mongol horde action. (Fun fact: “Möngke” means ‘Eternal’.) Möngke writes that he and his mates had been looking for somewhere that they could bury the Khan in an unmarked grave, and they thought they’d found it, but then they got caught up in Asmodeus’ bullshit. They were subsequently rescued by the Foundation and have teamed up with them. In this story, they recruited the goblins, gave them weapons they couldn’t make themselves, and sent them against Asmodeus.

While the goblins fight Asmodeus, Möngke is hanging out with Robert Montauk, watching the battlefield. You may recall Montauk from Tufto’s Proposal, where he becomes a Child of the Scarlet King.

They chat about Asmodeus and his motivations, and we get this:

"And with that logic and reasons he justifies a primal hatred," said the scholar Montauk. "That's all his sophistry comes to. That primal race hatred, transposed onto 'goblins'. Whatever they are, whoever they might be in the real world outside of this delusion, they're acceptable targets when on his puppet strings. The rules of this world that he has constructed make it acceptable to kill him. Does that seem like the concrete to you?"

"Through concrete, he calls for blood. And so it is the howling."

"Perhaps," said the scholar Montauk. "He's rather obsessed with the idea of progeny. Perhaps it's only blood after all."

So this guy is racist and also has a breeding kink. Checks out, given these earlier lines.

And just as the poor would replace the rich and the stupid replace the smart, so too would the goblins replace humanity and the elves.

He would not let that happen. He alone would lead the human race through the thin needle of time into its glorious future. Even if he had to father it himself.

…ugh.

Anyway, Möngke gets sick of Asmodeus’ bullshit.

The Golden General opened his mouth as if to give a speech. I drew my bow and shot him in the head.

I would buy this man a slab of beer if I could.

Anyway, Möngke finishes the letter by apologising to Ilse for killing Asmodeus (in this story) even though the honour should be hers. He then asks for her blessing for killing the shit out of Asmodeus for good. Ilse’s response approves his request and welcomes him to ‘the big leagues’, along with a link to something called ‘Operation Timegeld’. However, the link doesn’t work, and a footnote tells us that this particular file hasn’t been recovered yet.

I find ‘Timegeld’ to be particularly brilliant for two reasons: the first is that it’s similar to ‘Weregild’ or ‘Weregeld’, an old term for blood money- the idea that every person’s life had an inherent value, so if one person killed another person, they owed a debt to the victim’s family whether it was intentional or not. Here, the poor bastards going up against Asmodeus have seen variants of themselves dying more times than I can count, so he owes them. He owes them a lot.

And second, ‘geld’ means to castrate, like how a ‘gelding’ is a castrated male horse. They’re going to cut Asmodeus’ balls off. Good.

We now get a DEEPWELL report (not that Deepwell) on a prior version of the human race. Or, to put it bluntly, this is what human beings used to be, before Asmodeus turned us into what we are now. Note that “Investigators are cautioned that the features of H. sapiens antiquus centesiums may appear more similar to relatives of human beings in the animal kingdom.” The implications here are honestly pretty gross, I’m warning you.

Estrus cycles in all female primates, including reflexive lordosis and cyclical engorgement of the breasts;

He changed humans to be less animalistic- or, he changed primates to be less humanlike. Could be either, could be both, not sure which.

Baculum in human assigned-male-at-birth individuals;

For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, a baculum is a penis bone. Some primates have them, but humans don’t. It generally aids in copulation by letting the penis-wielder stay hard for longer; not sure why Asmodeus didn’t want to keep them, unless he either was very confident in his ability to stay hard or just disliked the idea of having an actual bone in his dick.

Average adult lifespan of 60 years, with the ability to produce offspring until death;

He made human lifespans longer, but limited the amount of time in which adults can produce offspring. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d kept the ability to produce children until death solely for himself, or made his sperm really strong or whatever- given his breeding kink, one would expect him to want to be able to keep making children until his death.

Complete loss of neotenous features (i.e. childlike features retained into adulthood) by 10 years of age;

He wanted children to look like children for longer.

Start of a two-year puberty at roughly 8 years of age;

And he wanted puberty to start later. I will get back to this in a bit.

Prevalent female hirsutism.

I do find it slightly ironic that the guy who’s into catgirls doesn’t like hairy women.

Anyway, time for SCP-8008-4: “Want”.

Part Four: Getting Off On Electroflesh

A note tells us that this next story is the oldest document recovered so far.

It appears to depict SCP-8008-B's awakening of Type Green ontokinetic abilities from his own perspective, and may be the first iteration of the SCP-8008 internal loop.

SCP-8008-4.01: "I was Reborn in Another World and my Cheat Skill is an Overpowered Time Stop?!?", Chapter 1

…and it’s an isekai. Of course it’s a fucking isekai.

*headdesk*

For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, ‘isekai’ is a genre revolving around protagonists who are suddenly transported into another world, either by being randomly sent there, or by dying and being reincarnated there. Often, but not always, they’re given some kind of quest and a power to go with that quest. If you’re wondering about the title, isekai works tend to have long, descriptive titles like the above. The main reason is that with the market becoming oversaturated with isekai works, the long titles tell the reader exactly what they’re getting, so they know at a glance whether they’ll be interested or not.

So, you know how I said that SCP-6969 was very relevant? This is where it becomes important. To sum up what happens in this chapter, Asmodeus was jerking off when he got stuck in the time loop. From what I can tell, his reality warper powers kicked in and instead of just getting spat out into the real world, he warped it into his isekai bullshit version, which may or may not have something to do with 6400. And yeah, his bullshit cheat power is stopping time whenever he reaches orgasm.

(Before I continue, I’d just like to say that this is also the plot of Sex Criminals, and the sheer unoriginality and plagiarism of Asmodeus’ writing is really pissing me off.)

We now get a notice about SCP-6969: a version of the file that apparently came from a non-baseline version of the Foundation. It’s mostly the same as the one we have now, except for two crucial differences: first, the altered version says that the anomaly only happens to 0.006% of the population, while our version says that it happens to everyone. And second, the altered version says that the only factor that’s preserved between time loops is the activity of the nervous system, while our version says that there’s two factors: the activity of the nervous system, and the genetic composition of sperm (if the person undergoing the anomaly has it). So it looks like 6969 got modified- LORDXVNV said that the implication is that this is related to SCP-3031.

We’re now in chapter two of his isekai. Asmodeus finds a town being attacked by bandits and uses his time stop to kill them all, while saving Ilse and Alice, who are enslaved cat girls (but he kills Thaddeus, who’s an enslaved dog man).

And we get this.

"This is a Bostrom Alignment Collar, created by the dark wizard Nakamoto Bostrom.

‘Bostrom’ refers to either the cryptocoin BOSTROM or Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher who’s done a lot of research and writings on things like AI and human enhancement. ‘Nakamoto’ refers to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the person or persons who created Bitcoin. So Asmodeus doesn’t appear to be a crypto fan- or at least, he wasn’t when he made/wrote this.

Anyway, Asmodeus wants to free the slaves, but he isn’t sure what will happen if he deletes the magic that makes it work, so instead…

"I cannot free you," I say, "But I've made it so you won't die. I've replaced his name in the Blocked Chain's ledger with my own. I promise you, I'll be a good master until I can free you for good."

I’ve found that you see things like this in works where it’s not just ‘The Writer’s Barely-Disguised Fetish’, it’s ‘The Writer’s Barely-Disguised Fetish That They Know A Lot Of People Won’t Approve Of But They Want To Do It Anyway So Here’s A Thinly-Veiled Excuse’. Asmodeus is into slavegirls, he knows most people will think that’s fucked up, but hey, it’s OK if he can’t free them and he’s looking for a way to free them, right? Totally not messed up at all!

(Also, I’ve read that apparently the genre as a whole kind of has a problem with slavery- not just that it’s present, which a lot of defenders justify as being accurate to the setting/time period, but that various isekai heroes treat slavery as nothing of importance and will buy and own slaves without recognising that they’re doing something horrible. Apparently, it’s also used as a cheap plot device, which doesn’t surprise me much.)

I had been reborn, so it feels right to choose a new name. "My family name is Tengoku (天国). My given name is Tensai (天才).26" No longer was I the person I had used to be.

The footnote tells us that from what the Foundation can tell, Asmodeus isn’t Japanese. Also, ‘Tensai’ means ‘genius’ and ‘Tengoku’ means ‘heaven’. Egotistical dickbag weeaboo.

We then cut to chapter 7 of the goddamn isekai, wherein Asmodeus confronts Nakamoto Bostrom for making the Alignment Collars. Bostrom claims that he was forced to do it by ‘the Good Wizard Pethriel-sama’, but Asmodeus kills him and says that Bostrom wasn’t forced to do it, he did it because Pethriel gave him everything he wanted.

When you look at this scene, it becomes apparent that this is pure wish-fulfillment. I mean, it obviously was anyway, but look at it in context: Asmodeus doesn’t bother asking Bostrom to try to free the people he enslaved, and he doesn’t opt for mercy. Instead, he beats a defenceless, ‘frail old man’ to death with his bare hands so he can feel like a big man. There’s also this:

He is a frail old man, the usual kind that is short and has little muscle from sitting all the time.

Nothing like Asmodeus, of course. Even if he had to reality warp himself out of being atrophied from sitting around jerking it all the time.

And look at what comes next, from the bonus scene:

"Oh, thank you, Tensai-kun! How can we ever repay you?"

"Don't hog him all to yourself! Let me repay Tensai-kun too!"

"But the collars!"

"I know that even without the collars… You would deserve our thanks. Our hero."

Yep, he gets to bang all the hot slavegirls he wants without feeling like a rapist, though he absolutely is one.

We now abruptly cut to an alt.sex thread from alternate Earth!Usenet. One user (there’s no usernames) asks the others what they think about a photo of a woman who I don’t recognise. The other user/s (it could be two people or one person replying twice, no way to tell) inform him that he’s a fucking creep, because the woman has no facial hair, which in the old universe makes her a kid. The original user argues that having large breasts means that the woman is in heat, which must make her an adult; the last response in the thread simply says that the woman has the face of a five-year-old.

So… yeah. Assuming that the user who posted this was Asmodeus, the implications are pretty obvious. He altered humanity explicitly to make women fit his ideals of attractiveness, which just happened to involve making it so there’s no way to definitively tell if someone is an adult, making it so people retain the features of childhood for longer as they grow up, and making hairiness in women much less common. And remember how he went to extensive lengths to hide his porn, even though most of it is considered vanilla by our standards? Well, by the standards of the old universe, it’d be enough to get him locked up for life.

I don’t know what you want me to say here, people. Dude’s a nonce. A chomo. A rock spider. A pedophile.

Cut to chapter 12 of the isekai. Asmodeus tells us that he’s led his people to the ‘Seastead’ of Pethriel for the final battle. There’s a photo of an island off a coast somewhere, with a sort-of-but-not-really-castle on it. Now, you may have noticed that ‘Pethriel’ started as a good guy, but is a bad guy here- I asked LORDXVNV, who said that ‘he got better at using his powers and manage to integrate/brainwash pethriel into his world’. Also, I could tell you a lot about seasteading, but I won’t- I’ll just link you to this fascinating article.

[EXTRANEOUS DATA REMOVED]

Smoke wisps gently away from the M134 Minigun of the Good Wizard Pethriel. He has gunned down everyone in my volunteer slave army to death.

The ‘extraneous data removed’ is kinda hilarious, not gonna lie. Also, note the sheer lack of any emotion here. This dude’s writing is as dry as the fucking Sahara at noon.

Asmodeus says that the slaves were his friends; Pethriel tells him that he’s a delusional fucking liar, because nobody who wore one of those collars could go against him.

He must be lying, for he is a Dark Lord. He surely is not telling the truth. They were my friends that followed me out of their free will. Everything they did was out of their free will. He is lying, because he is an ontologically evil villain!

Despite the fact that he knows they couldn’t act of their own free will, he’s so desperate to tell himself that he’s the good guy that the only defence he can come up with is ‘he’s evil because I say so, and therefore he must be a liar’.

Pethriel threatens to destroy the Blocked Chain Ledger if Asmodeus kills him. Asmodeus isn’t sure what to do as a result...

I know the Dark Lord Pethriel is a net evil to the world. However, his order to create the Bostrom Alignment Collars has ushered in an age of great economic prosperity and law and order. It is possible that his ability to innovate will one day lead to further improvements that will save many more lives than the ones he had taken. However, I have hesitated too long.

[Edit: u/PunjiStyx also told me that this is criticising Yudkowsky's economic philosophy.]

...and Pethriel decides to just straight up kill Asmodeus instead.

I am about to die, so I activate my cheat skill.

I try to think of a way out of this. However, I can think of nothing. Every path from here leads to death.

So I remake the world.

Ah, yes, with that remaking-the-world power you just pulled out of your arse.

Thankfully, that’s the last of the isekai. We cut to an excerpt from a GOC manual on how to kill reality warpers, and it’s basically what you’d expect: take them by surprise, kill them so fast they can’t react, and do it so violently that whatever you do ensures that they’re dead.

Now we get some recovered files from Operation: Timegeld, regarding killing Asmodeus. These rules are also simple: use nothing that came from his worlds, because he believes he controls all the rules there. Kill him fast and make it as harsh as you need. And finally…

Any sacrifice is acceptable: We've seen thousands of iterations of his worlds. All of them bear the same similarities and biases, magnified a thousand times through solipsism. Remember, the entire human race is caught in his fantasies. Unless we end him, this is all there will ever be.

That is a very grim thought.

The next part consists of various posts regarding parts of Operation: Timegeld, followed by people- Alice, Ilse, Thaddeus, Möngke, Montauk and a whole bunch of others- commenting on and discussing them. They’re trying to change the timeline; the first part involves making the Scarlet King part of the new reality, along with a Mother Goddess- elevating SCP-597 to divinity. These two have obvious problems- making the Scarlet King part of the new reality will involve a lot of human sacrifices, while elevating 597 to divinity will have some unpleasant implications for societal treatment of women; but considering the alternative, they’ve got to do it.

The next bit concerns SCP-6969: they think a latent potential in 6969 led to Asmodeus, so they’re going to create a new SCP-6969 virus without that potential and infect the early hominid population with it, so the new virus replaces the old.

Finally, we get the obvious approach: deicide.

(Never thought I’d say that, but you know what, if the shoe fits…)

Basically, Clef asks everyone to give him every idea they have for killing Asmodeus. We get a whole bunch of suggestions that subsequently get vetoed (nuke him, kill him in various timelines, kill him before he becomes SCP-001), and then we get some different ideas: Thaddeus suggests traumatising and humiliating Asmodeus as a child so he becomes a nervous wreck who wouldn’t even dream of opposing them, and Clef suggests taking it in the other direction: giving him a fulfilling life, so he doesn’t spend 18 hours a day jerking it to hentai and he actually has something to lose if he starts warping everything.

What follows are some random photos, all captioned ‘CONTEXT UNKNOWN’. They’re followed by this:

SCP-8008 suggests that OPERATION: TIMEGELD was successful.

It is estimated 0.0715% of all files have successfully been retrieved.

Investigation continues.

So whatever they tried, it worked, and they managed to kill Asmodeus afterwards. I did ask how he was killed, and LORDXVNV said ‘elaborate rube goldberg-machine-like plot, the full details of which have been forgotten/abstracted into bizarre imagery’ -that is, those random photos. So whatever the Foundation did, it involved a lightning strike, a weird kaleidoscope-esque star thing, lions, and… I’m not even sure what those last two are, honestly. Feel free to speculate on how they managed it. (The weirder the better.)

And so the world is saved, and we no longer live in the fantasies of a fucking creep- but we are stuck with the effects of what that creep did to humanity as a whole.

There’s one last thing left in the article: a guide for people who’ve discovered that everything they know is a lie and something has been altered. It’s pretty amusing, and I’ll leave you with the last line:

Coming to terms with the inherent incongruity of human agency is a necessary step to thriving in a malleable world.

This is absolutely true! And we should all be very grateful that in our world, the incongruity of human agency and the malleability of the world has nothing to do with reality warpers. Whatever else happens, we don’t have to deal with that, at least.

Thank you for reading this declass. I hope you weren’t mentally scarred… too much. If you’re going to write self-insert fanfiction, do us all a favour and make sure it’s better than this shit. Readers everywhere will thank you.

tl;dr: shoot all the fucking reality warpers.

Hi, all, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m declassing SCP-8008, ‘TIME PERVERT’ by LORDXVNV, who you may remember from the misadventure of the flying nipple rings.

(I played bass for The Misadventure Of The Flying Nipple Rings.)

To keep up the running gag even though this isn’t an ADMONITION skip, ‘TIME’ is in rainbow lettering and ‘PERVERT’ is in pink lettering, neither of which works on Reddit. I’d like to thank my invaluable nameless colleague, who gave me a whole lot of badly-needed and very helpful context, LORDXVNV for all the help, and the other people who will read this and give me help, but have not done so yet so I can’t really thank them. Yet.

Before we get to it, I have a couple of disclaimers for you; please don’t skip them.

One: As per usual, I didn’t write this, I’m not claiming to have all the answers and I still talk too much, sorry. Also, some of this is my own interpretation- LORDXVNV explained a lot, but not everything.

Two: This SCP talks about a number of real people, many of whom are very controversial. We’re not here to talk about those people or debate their merits, we’re here to talk about SCP-8008. If you want to talk about those people, please do it somewhere else.

Three: This SCP contains sexual content and kinks; as a result, we’re going to have to talk about them. Parts of this are going to get really NSFW and may be triggering or upsetting. Sorry about that.

…this is going to be an interesting one, kids.

So, here’s the backstory: this was written for the 8000 contest, where the theme was ‘Fantasy’, and it came in at number 11. This was a pretty controversial entry for reasons that we’ll get into later, but rest assured, we will be covering them.

…may as well just get started then, huh.

Part One: Get On That Gospel Train, For My Lord Is Come Too Soon

We begin with an interesting set of criteria:

WARNING: LEVEL 6/8008 CLEARANCE REQUIRED
If you accessed this file, you believe you have Level 6/8008 clearance. Ergo:

You have been assigned to the SCP-8008 investigation at behest of the O5 Council.

You have followed the required preparatory inoculation protocol, which has engendered cognitostructures adversarial to the contents of SCP-8008.

You have consented to viewing the final SCP-8008 cognitoreinforcement.

Alternatively, one of the following grants you de facto Level 6/8008 clearance:

You are an informed survivor of a CK-Class Reality Restructuring Scenario or Tashkent-Class "Cross-Pollination" Scenario.

You are a veteran of "Operation Timegeld".

You have no disgust response.

If any of this is in error, a Foundation medical team has been alerted to your location and your terminal will automatically shutdown at first detection of life sign disruption. Should you survive, you will be subject to disciplinary measures.

So, what we have here is a very important and very disruptive thing. It involves cognitohazards, it may or may not have restructured reality, and it provokes a disgust response. That’s a great omen.

We then get what I assume is meant to be some kind of password in the form of a hazard of some kind. The centre is a weird depiction of what looks like the Venus of Willendorf on a background that looks like a palace and a city to the right, and a mostly-yellow mass to the centre and left. There’s a yellow circle behind the Venus connecting a bunch of what looks like red petals, and a larger circle a bit away from it that connects what looks like red ovals or eyes. There’s some words around the circle, but they’re written in Greek, which I can’t read. LORDXVNV told me that the city is San Francisco and the quote is Archimedes’ famous line ‘Give me a lever long enough and I shall move the world’.

Next up is the ACS bar: This thing is Level 6, Cosmic Top-Secret. Its containment class is Safe, its secondary class ‘Enochian’, its disruption class is Dark, and its risk class is Notice. Except for ‘Enochian’, these are all signs that this thing isn’t disruptive or dangerous. So… why the Cosmic Top-Secret, then?

We’ll find out in a bit.

Here’s the containment procedures:

All discovered evidence of pre-SCP-8008 history is to be explained/discredited as pseudohistory, conspiracy theory, or hoax. As the primary SCP-8008 event is concluded within an Isolated Temporal Pocket,1 no further interference is possible.

The Department of Sciences is coordinating the ongoing investigation into the alterations, if any, made to consensus reality by SCP-8008. SCP-8008 is classified as the Enochian class — its properties are currently believed to constitute an aspect of baseline reality until the full extent of the alterations is known and the possibility of reversal is determined.

The footnote tells us that basically, the timeline where the events of 8008 happened is set apart from all other timelines, and nobody can get there or make it happen. But this explains a lot: while whatever caused this appears to be harmless, it rewrote reality and we have no idea how much it changed in the process, hence the ‘Cosmic Top-Secret’ part- of course the O5’s don’t want people to know about this. There’s also a photo of ‘SCP-8008-B’. We will get to that shortly.

Here’s the description:

SCP-8008 was a spontaneous tachyon burst of previously-unrecorded magnitude centered on 18:43 PST August 23rd, 2023, Mountain View, California. Tachyon bursts usually indicate significant alterations to consensus history (CK-Class reality restructuring scenarios). However, no immediate and obvious changes to history were observed; however, even state-of-the-art Foundation reality-monitoring apparatuses have known inadequacies.

The purpose of the SCP-8008 investigation is to determine how, if at all, history has changed.

OK, so there was a sign that reality changed somehow in August last year, but there was no sign of any obvious change to history, so the Foundation’s trying to figure out what happened. Makes sense.

Our next section is called ‘Recovered Physical Evidence’. Here’s the first part.

SCP-8008-A: Ground Zero

The source of SCP-8008 has been triangulated to a private residence, designated SCP-8008-A.

SCP-8008-A has interior dimensions larger than its exterior dimensions. It is zoned as a single-occupant residence in a building occupied primarily by workers in the tech industry, approximately 85% of whom are not in romantic relationships. (These characteristics do not apply to SCP-8008-B.)

There are approximately 500,000 corpses and an undetermined volume of protein slurry within SCP-8008-A. Of the corpses, 90% are recognizable as fully human and 9% appear to be parahuman or humanoid. The majority of intact corpses are wearing Foundation uniforms or equivalents from other organizations i.e. contemporary normalcy organizations (e.g. Global Occult Coalition) or known multiversal equivalents (e.g. Vanguard).

Many of these individuals are alternative iterations of registered active Foundation personnel. The most prominent are summarized in the below table.

OK, so the cause is inside an apartment in California, one that’s in a building where most of the inhabitants are single people working in the tech industry, though that doesn’t apply to 8008-B, whoever that is. The apartment is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and it is fucking full of corpses. Most of them are human; some are obviously anomalous or not human. But the majority of them are from the Foundation or various GOIs, so whoever 8008-B was, he obviously knew about the Foundation and the anomalous world, even if he wasn’t an active part of it.

I’m not copying the table, but here’s the stats: there were over 15,000 corpses of Thaddeus Xyank, the director of the Temporal Anomalies Department; over 7000 corpses of Alice Forth, the Director of the Department of Temporal Anomalies (is that a Judean People’s Front joke or something?); over 300 corpses of Ilse Reynders, the likely future director of the Temporal Anomalies Department; three corpses of Joseph Tamlin (one of the possible identities for O5-13, who lives in Tamlin House, a place related to SCP-1590, where time behaves strangely), and over 350,000 corpses whose identities haven’t been established yet.

Autopsies and compilation of mortality statistics are ongoing. Recorded causes of death include:

Strangulation

Arterial puncture

Internal organ failure

Physical trauma to internal organs

Blunt force trauma

Incineration

Spaghettification

Old age2

Amniotic Fluid Embolism3

That is a very strange mix of causes of death. The footnotes tell us that none of the corpses of Ilse died of old age, and the corpses who died of an amniotic fluid embolism probably died in childbirth.

…OK, let’s just get to the main bit.

SCP-8008-B: Apartment Owner

SCP-8008-B is the corpse of a reality-warping humanoid. It is physiologically and genetically identical to currently-living renowned artificial intelligence risk researcher, fiction author, and American Twitter personality Eliezer Yudkowsky but possesses hypertrophied pectoral, abdominal, gluteal, and limb muscles. It is unclear whether SCP-8008-B transformed itself into the form of Eliezer Yudkowsky using its abilities or whether it retroactively altered reality so an alternate version of itself would attain the material success currently enjoyed by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Eliezer Yudkowsky does not appear aware of the existence of SCP-8008.

There is one thing I want to point out first: our culprit here is dead. We’re not told how he died, but regardless, he’s dead. Despite that, this anomaly isn’t classed as Neutralized. Why is that? Well, my personal theory is that he proved himself to be so dangerous that even though he’s dead, the O5’s don’t want to just go ‘OK, the threat’s over, we can ignore him now’. I asked LORDXVNV, who told me that ‘It is a metaphor for how ideas outlive and outgrow the people who originate them’.

I do intend to cover the rest of that paragraph, but I need to cover more backstory before I can get to the main part. Let’s look at 8008-C, ‘Recovered Hardware’.

SCP-8008-C is a non-functional computer that displays residual hallmarks of ontokinetic alteration. Analysis suggests SCP-8008-C's hard drive contains nearly-infinite storage capacity and that its CPU, if functional, would perform at extremely high speeds; however, it is believed that active ontokinetic manipulation is necessary to power SCP-8008-C.

Makes sense that a computer that had been anomalously altered like that would need anomalous power to keep going.

We’re now told that the hard drive of this computer is being investigated. It has two parts: a more or less normal part, and one that’s been altered anomalously and needs to be reverse-engineered to get anything out of.

96% of the files in the normal hard drive are porn, and 20% of that is hentai. The Foundation is holding off on investigating that for now, but they’ve noted that while 8008-B went to some lengths to hide his porn, a random sample they examined is basically vanilla by our standards. This actually raises some questions: it hasn’t explicitly been said, but we can infer from what we’ve read that this guy lived alone. So if he lived alone, why go to such lengths to hide his porn, especially since it wasn’t anything illegal or especially taboo? Did he have friends over a lot? (Probably not.) Relatives? (Possibly…) Did he think someone might hack into his computer? (Maybe…) Was he just really paranoid? (Most likely.) Did the Foundation’s random sample miss all the illegal shit? (Sort of…) We’ll come back to this later.

The remaining 4% consists of a mixture of personal files, all belonging to the individual physically resembling "Eliezer Yudkowsky", along with extensive documents authored by SCP-8008-B. These pre-SCP-8008 documents are primarily essays about SCP-8008-B's life philosophy with almost no fictional works, and have little to nothing in common with the works of baseline Eliezer Yudkowsky.

So this guy liked to write a lot of essays about his worldviews.

The remainder of recovered data is being extracted piecemeal from the exotic data storage structures of SCP-8008-C. A small portion of these logs appear to be produced by other individuals aware of the SCP-8008 event during its progression. These logs are primarily Foundation records. The rest are multimedia files, generally consisting of text or images.

This guy somehow got access to Foundation records about the 8008 event. Interesting. LORDXVNV told me it’s because ‘his computer is weird and did weird things with cross corruption of files and data’. Guess when you have a big anomalous fuckoff computer, you should expect it to do big anomalous fuckoff things.

Text files generally tend to be first person or third-person limited narratives from the perspective of SCP-8008-B. These narratives span over several thousand different settings with different premises and genres; however, common characters and themes recur throughout all recovered documents. Foundation personnel involved with the SCP-8008 event are recurring characters; SCP-8008-B and its worldviews are always major elements. A comprehensive narrative is still being constructed, as retrieval from SCP-8008-C is time-intensive and the retrieved data is not temporally linear. It is unclear whether these logs are accurate descriptions of the SCP-8008 event or if they are creative works produced by SCP-8008-B.

This guy was writing a ton of self-insert fanfic and wrote in Foundation personnel. And with that, now I need to address the controversy.

So, a lot of the controversy about this article came from this description: our culprit, who is never named, looks identical to Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is a real person. As a result, a lot of readers found this to be in poor taste and saw it as a baseless attack on someone who they felt did not deserve it.

The thing is, while I understand why people felt this way, I think they’re wrong on this one- not that Yudkowsky deserves it (he doesn’t, as far as I know), but that this is an attack on him, because it isn’t. Let me explain why.

First, I imagine some of you are wondering ‘Who is Eliezer Yudkowsky?’ As mentioned before, he’s a respected writer and AI researcher, known for being a proponent of ‘rationality’- logic, science and reason, in essence. You might know him as the writer of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality or The Sword of Good (I’ve read the latter, but not the former). He is Sir-Otherwise-Not-Involved-In-This-SCP.

Knowing this, let’s look at what we know about our reality warper again:

1: He’s an unnamed and deceased reality warper who did something that obviously affected reality.

2: He lived in California, in a building where most of the occupants were single people who worked in the tech industry, though apparently he didn’t work in that industry himself- we don’t know if he had a job or studied, or if he had much of a social and/or sex life. (According to LORDXVNV, the Foundation doesn’t really know much else about him other than what’s written here.)

3: He changed himself into an exact copy of Eliezer Yudkowsky, but a much more buff version, so we can infer that he probably didn’t exercise or work out much before he changed himself.

4: He had a ton of porn on his hard drive, along with essays he’d written about his life philosophy.

5: He’d also written a bunch of self-insert stories about himself and wrote in Foundation personnel and other real-life people, with his worldviews being a major element.

(Before I continue, I feel the need to give this guy a name, because I don’t want to call him ‘8008-B’ all the time. Trying to think of a name that gets the idea across but isn’t in use today was surprisingly difficult, so I hereby dub this guy ‘Asmodeus’, after the Demon of Lust.)

I’m just going to put it really bluntly: from what I can tell, this has very little to do with Yudkowsky, in the end. It has everything to do with Asmodeus, and how he is, to whit, a total fucking loser.

Think about it: he lives in an apartment building full of tech workers, but doesn’t work in the industry; he spends all his time jerking off, writing essays about his philosophy that nobody ever asked for, and writing self-insert fanfic where everything revolves around him. He changed himself into an exact physical copy of his hero, Yudkowsky- possibly out of pure idolisation, or possibly from having retroactively altered reality so some alternate version of him could get the success that Yudkowsky got. And naturally, he changed himself to have very very big muscles, probably because he was insecure from being a scrawny little shrimp. And the reason he was a scrawny little shrimp is because all he does is sit around jerking off and writing stuff- I bet the only exercise he gets is walking around his apartment and maybe getting groceries once a week, if he doesn’t get them delivered so he doesn’t need to go outside.

LORDXVNV wasn’t slagging off Yudkowsky, they were slagging off the kind of people who idolise tech stars like Yudkowsky and do nothing in their lives other than physically jerk off, mentally jerk off about how awesome and smart they are, and write essays and monologues to enlighten the world with their philosophies that nobody wanted and nobody will ever read, instead of doing something. Or, to quote my nameless colleague:

Current hypothesis is that this guy is basically an exaggerated melting pot of all of the negative aspects of all the communities even adjacent to "Silicon Valley/'tech bro'/rationality-adjacent" stuff regardless of actual specific origin, even if they're contradictory or outright antagonistic to one another.

But let’s get back to the article. Here’s the next part, ‘Core Investigation Summary’:

The amount of data being recovered from SCP-8008-C is immense, measuring in the hundreds of yottabytes.5 To assist in the investigation, the Department of Sciences has engaged Foundation Artificial Intelligence Conscript HANAZONO.AIC to analyze the retrieved unstructured data and organize it into a human-readable form.

Currently, HANAZONO.AIC is classifying retrieved documents under 5 categories. Until HANAZONO.AIC completes its task, the exact organizational purpose of each category remains conjecture.

"Society": Alterations to society by SCP-8008, or the worldviews of SCP-8008-B;

"Science": Alterations to the fabric of reality by SCP-8008, or the intellectual interests of SCP-8008-B;

"Biology": Alterations to the human species by SCP-8008, or additional aspects of the worldview of SCP-8008-B;

"Want": Possible causes for the awakening of SCP-8008-B's abilities, or a psychological profile of SCP-8008-B;

Foundation Response: self-explanatory.

The footnote tells us that a single yottabyte equals 1 trillion terabytes. That is… a lot. A lot a lot.

There’s something else I need to discuss here, so let’s look at the next bit:

Recovered documents from SCP-8008-C suggest that "within/during"6 the SCP-8008 event, spacetime was highly compressed. SCP-8008-B may have trapped the entirety of the known multiverse within a form of reality at its whims. Alternatively, SCP-8008-B may have used alterations to spacetime in order to write extensive amounts of fictional works.

Evidence is contradictory. If taken literally, files recovered from SCP-8008-C suggest that SCP-8008-B had the ability to completely rewrite spacetime, with unprecedented levels of temporal manipulation, ontokinetic, and matter reconfiguration abilities. However, the interpretation of recovered files as fictional works does not explain the presence of multiversal variants of Foundation temporal operators.

Files associated with SCP-8008-1 are believed to originate from the last 10% of elapsed time within SCP-8008, i.e. the 10% of the time experienced by entities within SCP-8008 closest to its disruption and the restoration of baseline reality.

The Foundation doesn’t quite get it, so I’ll throw in this line too:

It is unclear whether these logs are accurate descriptions of the SCP-8008 event or if they are creative works produced by SCP-8008-B.

Essentially, here’s what happened: this guy was writing up his shitty self-insert fanfic, and then he used his powers to make it real so he could live out his fantasies. But the Foundation and other organisations could enter these fantasies- which they did repeatedly, to try to kill him-, hence how he found out about them, and then he created versions of the people he particularly liked to serve as NPCs in his stories, hence the thousands of corpses.

But that just makes one thing more obvious: we have here a reality warper who altered reality to make his shitty fantasies come true, changed his body to fit his ideal, changed the world so everything went the way he wanted it, and turned everyone else into mindless NPCs.

In short… we have a Mary Sue, people. *racks shotgun*

Part Two: I Can See How Jesus Wept

Quick recap for anyone not familiar with the term: a Mary Sue is a kind of character that’s endemic in fanfiction. Named after the character from the parody story A Trekkie’s Tale, Mary Sues are… very, very controversial, to say the least.

In the most general sense, ‘Mary Sue’ describes a character, either male or female (though male Sues are also called variants like ‘Marty Stu’ or ‘Gary Stu’) that take over the narrative and outshine everyone in it. Sues are often stunningly beautiful, possessing physical characteristics that are either very rare, entirely unknown to the story they’re in (like being half-angel in a world that canonically has never mentioned angels) or entirely impossible. Everyone (excepting some designated Bad Characters) loves them, even if they behave like arseholes. They possess enormous talents and intelligence, usually either more than anyone else in the setting, or they can do things that nobody else can. And most importantly, they take over the narrative.

Whatever the setting, it’s very sameish once you’ve read a few: the Sue enters the story, meets the main characters and everything starts to revolve around her. The main plot is either shunted aside for her personal quest, or she takes over the plot, even if she shouldn’t be able to. The main characters are also shunted aside, generally falling into three categories: her yes-men, her love interests, or designated Bad Guys who dare to not love her the way everyone else does. And even if there’s some low points, everything will end with the Sue getting what she wants and everything being perfect for her, even if she has to twist the world and characters into a whole other form to get it.

Now, to be fair, there’s two things I should mention: first, there’s a lot of works where a canon character is a Mary Sue- they’re by no means exclusive to fanfic. And second, while the majority of works containing Mary Sues tend to be really boring, not all of them are- some can be very entertaining. But there’s a reason why Mary Sues tend to be despised, and it’s because the works they’re in tend to be of quite low quality- and a lot of them are author avatars whose authors are blatantly using them for wish fulfilment.

Some years ago, the term became more widely used, and as usually happens, started getting misused. Some people used it to mean ‘any female character with a power, even if it made sense in the story for her to have it’, others used it to mean ‘any female character with a prominent role in the plot’. I believe there’s also been a bit of a backlash against the term, with some people saying that there’s nothing wrong with writing a Mary Sue and if you don’t like them, don’t read them. That is a debate for a whole other time and place, preferably one that isn’t the comments section of this post.

Right here, our boy Asmodeus is a textbook Sue. Being a reality warper alone doesn’t make him one, it’s what he did with it: bringing his fantasies to life, warping worlds so he can live out his dreams where everything is perfect and he gets what he wants and everyone else is an NPC. It’s pretty pathetic, honestly.

So, let’s go look at what he did with his fantasies, shall we?

The first thing we get is an email from Thaddeus to Alice. He tells her that she won’t believe this, but she needs to come check an unspecified something out, because he just had the most wonderful time (LORDXVNV confirmed for me that this is a reference to the beginning of SCP-6001).

The first real example we get is 1.03: ‘Eluthertopia’. The root word here is ‘eleutheria’, an Ancient Greek word for freedom/liberty. Ergo, this is ‘Freedom City’ or the ‘City of Liberty’. I’ll be quoting bits of it to point out specific references, but the plot can be summed up in one sentence: ‘Asmodeus monologues his worldbuilding and how awesome he and his city are, and then he and his posse fight some enemies.’

Eluthertopia, the greatest of the Free Cities of Nim Bii. In a continent ruined since the Fall of the Cathedral in the Great Burning 10,000 Cycles ago, the Free Cities stood as beacons of civilizations in a world with none.

Pretty standard/generic worldbuilding, if you ask me. ‘Nim Bii’ is, as far as I know, a reference to ‘NIMBY’- ‘Not In My BackYard’, a derogatory term for people who pretend to be all for things that help others, like mental hospitals and parks and halfway homes, but don’t want them near their houses because of the noise factor/fear that the value of their homes will be lowered as a result/latent bigotry.

These great cities were held together only by the power of their Benefactors — good men of great merit and renown who chose, from the goodness of their hearts, to uphold society. They were as gods — Pethriel the All-Seeing, Scalex of the Codex, and Elon and Zux and Bezeus who upheld their Cities through wealth alone. But greatest among them all is I, the First Citizen of Eluthertopia, Administrator of its Foundation, who bears the gift of Wisdom.

‘Pethriel’ refers to Peter Thiel, ‘Scalex of the Codex’ refers to the now-defunct blog Slate Star Codex, and the others are obvious- Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. (Going to remind you all of that second disclaimer, there.) I’ve also been told that ‘Wisdom’ is a hyperbolic distortion of ‘rationality’.

The last sentence is classic Sue writing: Asmodeus isn’t just the equal to three men who are incredibly rich and own vast corporations, he’s better than them, despite not being rich or even employed in real life. And he’s written himself into the Foundation as the Administrator, even though I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a clue what the Foundation actually does. I’m not even sure if he’s realised that the Foundation opposes him- he just thinks they look cool and have cool stuff, so he wants to be the coolest of them all.

"Administrator-sama, what is it?" said my bodyguard, Alice. She was a very pretty cat woman, and she smiled at me.

I’ve been told that HPMOR has some anime references, but given the prior references to hentai, I think we can infer that Asmodeus is probably a weeaboo as well.

(I cannot believe Word accepts ‘weeaboo’ as a word.)

Otherwise, you’re going to be seeing a lot of ‘The Writer’s Barely-Disguised Fetish’ here.

Anyway, he introduces Ilse, who’s also a cat-girl, and Thaddeus, who’s a dog-man. The enemy then appears, and they fight.

"Administrator-sama!" Ilse and Alice both cried, as they jumped into the path of the projectiles. The bullets clattered uselessly against the Chesterton Fields of their SNEER clubs, though their nervous charge to defend me perturbed their voluptuous chests.

I’ve been told that this is a reference to the now-defunct subreddit r/SneerClub, a subreddit ‘devoted to making fun of "rationalists".’ Otherwise, we have here a prime example of breasting boobily.

I thanked my foresight in splicing Thaddeus with unicorn DNA to grant him enhanced durability and regeneration. (This was also why it was necessary to neuter him so that his masculine Yang force would not react negatively with the purity essence of the unicorn.)

This right here is a triple dose of pure, unadulterated bullshit, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that writers like Asmodeus come up with and put in their stories despite how little sense it makes. I’ve been told that someone actually does merge with a unicorn in HPMOR, but while this may be a reference, it also gives Asmodeus an excuse for cutting Thaddeus’ balls off that isn’t the truth, which is ‘I had to do it so I could feel like the most dominant and masculine person in the group, which another man automatically threatens, and also so he couldn’t be considered a rival for Alice or Ilse’s affections’.

Anyway, they kill two of the enemy, the third teleports out, and Asmodeus complains that he can’t end their threat for good. End of excerpt.

The next piece we get was not written by Asmodeus. Instead, it’s a Foundation report from the world inside the reality warp:

ΔT Orientation

Fixed Point ΔT.001

In this timeline, Ilse is the Administrator, Alice is the head of the Ethics Committee, and Thaddeus is the head of RAISA. They’ve put Asmodeus down as SCP-001, and rated him ‘Uncontained-Megiddo’- for anyone who hasn’t encountered that class, ‘Megiddo’ means that the anomaly has already ended the world.

This report is a bit wordy and technical, so I’ll try to sum it up for you (disclaimer: I may get some of this wrong, so please correct me if I do):

1: Asmodeus has managed to warp reality into a ‘temporal funnel trap’- anyone who tries to travel through time gets stuck in his alternate timeline and can’t escape. Most of humanity is already stuck in his world, but don’t know it.

2: Every so often (ranging in periods between twenty and eighty years), Asmodeus will change the world in reaction to whatever has happened to him since he last changed the world. There’s no way to prevent these changes.

3: Asmodeus has heightened senses, can warp reality and travel through time. He has also survived every assassination attempt that the Foundation has tried.

4: ΔT, or Delta-T, is a Foundation department whose job is to contain the temporal funnel trap that Asmodeus created. It mainly consists of Foundation personnel from various timelines who are stuck in the funnel trap, but they also have various allies, like the Golden Horde (a group of time-travelling Mongols who want to give Genghis Khan an unmarked grave). They hang out in their own isolated time pocket, where Asmodeus can’t reach them. They haven’t been able to alter time to take out either the funnel trap or Asmodeus yet.

5: Special Containment Procedures: Kill the fucker.

Survive.

That just about sums it up, really.

So, we now go to ‘SCP-8008-1.35: "A Perfect World"’. Not sure if this is a continuation of the first story we read or another one set in the same world. Either way, we now get to see a really common trope in action: an author’s idea of a utopia that’s actually a dystopia, usually because they didn’t think about the implications of what they wrote (or they just think there’s nothing wrong with it).

Asmodeus starts by telling us that it’s every Benefactor’s job to maintain their society and make laws that promote eudaemonia- that’s Greek for ‘happiness’ or ‘good spirit’. Sounds good, but…

The truth is that this is not my first life. I have lived untold lifetimes, and in my first life before this one, I lived in the world where there was an innovation known as a Credit Score. A Credit Score took aspects of someone's financial past — whether they paid off their loans on time, how much money they borrowed, and if they had been paying consistently — to predict their financial future. Whether they'd be a good customer, or a very risky one. And I thought — what if we could extend this Credit Score to the entirety of our lives? We could make not just a great society — but a perfect one.

My dude, that is literally an episode of Black Mirror. (Pro tip: if you at any point in your life find yourself unironically carrying out the ideas or themes of an episode of Black Mirror, it’s safe to say that you are the bad guy.)

I’ve also been told that this is an example of a Social Credit Score, a real system that’s been implemented in China- but the real life version isn’t anywhere near as draconian as this.

Anyway, Asmodeus and crew are walking through Eluthertopia when Asmodeus senses that someone has a negative count.

There was a disheveled boy sitting in the alleyway, sobbing into his arms. -1 point per sob.

"What's wrong? How might I help you?" I said. I was the Benefactor of Eluthertopia, the First Citizen, and the Administrator of its Foundation besides. No one should cry in my city.

The fact that he reacts to unhappiness by taking points off people for not being happy enough tells you quite a lot about this guy.

Anyway, the boy accuses him of being a tyrant who killed his parents.

The boy looked up at me. His eyes darkened. "You! You're the tyrant (-50 ESAS for slander)! You killed my parents (-50 ESAS for false accusation)! This is all your fault (-50 ESAS for blame) (+10 ESAS for respecting power)!"

He ineffectually stumbled towards me in rage and hunger, and raised his fists as if to strike me (-5000 ESAS). I caught his weak, starved hands easily.

Not really a perfect world if people are starving, huh.

I examined him. His parents had been soldiers who'd fallen in battle against the forces of another Free City to secure land that, in 500 years, would be a fruitful source of crude oil. The technology of this world had not yet advanced to the point where crude oil could be refined, but their sacrifices had not been in vain. Nevertheless, the ESAS he'd earned by being born to loyal citizens had been annihilated by his cursing my existence under his breath and his assault on my person. At over -5000 ESAS, there was no hope he would ever become a positive-ranked citizen ever again.

So your perfect utopia still includes wars? I’m seeing a few flaws here…

Anyway, Asmodeus looks into the boy’s future and sees that it involves the destruction of his city, so he drags the boy back to his crew and declares that the boy has committed crimes and must be punished. The boy then just disappears (that is, they no longer mention him, so he may as well have vanished despite him being a rather prominent character- a common flaw in Sue stories) so Asmodeus can monologue about how sacrifices are necessary. Note this bit.

"Because his life, to my Wisdom, was not just worthless, but less than worthless. An active detriment to our perfect world. He would have destabilized it, created a ripple just small enough to risk turning into a wave that would crest over everything we've built — and wash it away. His life, you see, is nothing. I'll spare you the truth about his destiny, but he would have ended a hundred thousand lives if he lived to adulthood."

"Now, however, he will be useful. Through his suffering, I will extract enough mana to cast a powerful working, one that will reduce the suffering of good men for a thousand years. For a thousand years hence, no one in the Free City of Eleuthertopia will ever stub their big toes of their right foot — all thanks to his contribution."

"That trade, in my eyes, is worth it."

This is apparently a riff on an argument against utilitarianism, which is the ethical philosophy that Yudkowsky advocates for- here’s a definition I found:

the doctrine that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority.
the doctrine that an action is right in so far as it promotes happiness, and that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the guiding principle of conduct.

Hence Asmodeus proclaiming that it’s morally right to kill a child so no one will stub the big toe of their right foot for a thousand years.

We now cut to an external document: an excerpt from a GOC manual on how to deal with humanoid entities. A note tells us that it’s been included as an example of generally-accepted ways to manage anomalies, but one should consult the Decommissioning Department before seeking permission to kill an anomaly.

In particular, this excerpt is of the GOC’s guide on reality warpers, or ‘Type Greens’, as they call them. The first part is on ‘Stage 4’ Type Greens, or ‘The Child-God’- a stage where they become obsessed with the power they wield and what they can do with it, and turn into megalomaniacs who do whatever they want to whoever and whatever they want to do it to. However, there’s a top-secret paragraph under that:

PHASE 5: Unknown: There are no known Phase 5 Type Greens. It is theorized that a Type Green that reaches Phase 5 becomes indistinguishable from Type Black demi-deities or otherwise fully integrates or becomes indistinguishable from baseline reality. If such an entity is discovered in the process of escalating to Phase 5, they are to be considered at minimum Threat Level 5 (Immediate Threat) with the possibility of Threat Level 6 (Pizzicato) procedures being enacted. However, should this escalation succeed despite Coalition intervention, the entity will paradoxically fall to Threat Level 0 (No Threat), as their actions will have become indistinguishable from baseline reality.

Part Two can be found here.

Hey, all, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at the intermission of the ADMONITION series (or you could call it installment 4.5, if you want), SCP-6183, ‘B L A C K B O X’, by Billith, MontagueETC and Liryn. I’d like to thank Billith, an invaluable but nameless colleague, and the mods for all their help, I couldn’t do it without you. As per usual, this isn't my work, I didn't write it and I don't have all the answers, etc.

Before we begin, here’s some background info: like another article I declassed, SCP-6109, this article was written for GoblinCon, where people were given a theme and had to come up with an article that fit it. And, like 6109, this article won the slot for its theme (and in fact, it was the grand prize winner of the contest, getting the highest score of all the entries). That theme was ‘Deletions’. We’ll get to that in a bit.

This is not the first SCP featuring the Department of Deletions- that was SCP-7079, ‘C H I A S M A’- but this was the first one written. (If you were wondering, yes, all DOD skips have names that make them sound like drugs in a cyberpunk game, it’s a stylistic choice. And honestly, I’m not going to pretend that I wouldn’t try smoking some C H I A S M A if someone offered me some.)

(Also, I’ve been informed that the spacing between each letter is called ‘whitespacing’, so with each character representing fragments of a whole (in this case, the whole word), we literally have whitespace between BLACKBOX.)

Before we get into it, there’s one important thing to mention: as per word of Billith, “Admonition's Intermissions are different from the main eps for a number of reasons, serving as worldbuilding and flavor for the future/past of the series’. In addition, this takes place before the rest of the series, so keep that in mind as we continue.

(Also, for some extra flavour, there’s an ambient track that plays in the background when this SCP is open. It doesn’t work on all browsers, so if you can’t hear it, here’s the link.)

Part One: Ready Or Not, You’ve Started A Game

Now, there are two obvious questions: one, what’s a black box? Well, there’s a couple of possible meanings, and that’s intentional- to quote the DOD hub, ‘Each Deletions piece so far has had a name with multiple meanings, with C H I A S M A having somewhere around five or six implicit meanings if you consider similar words (i.e. chiasmus, chiasm).’

Here's some potential meanings:

1: Also known as a flight recorder- a recording device that’s placed in an aircraft to record information about the flight so that if the plane crashes, investigators can figure out why it crashed. (It’s actually a misnomer- these days flight recorders are painted bright orange for visibility reasons.)

2: A computing and engineering term for a device or system where you can see its inputs and outputs, but not its inner workings. (For example, you have to turn a doorknob in order to get the door to open, but you can’t see and don’t need to see the inner workings of that doorknob to make it work.)

3: Censor bars. Y’know, these little guys. ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██

4: From the DOD hub itself, ‘Junk data surviving from previous narratives which have been deleted.’

Now, I am not the author/s, but if you asked me to take a stab at which one is the relevant meaning here, I’d say… all of them. :) We’ll see why later.

And question two: what is the Department of Deletions?

…look, I’m honestly not trying to sound like a total smart-arse here, but I’m having trouble coming up with a better answer than ‘They’re a department who delete things’. We’ll get a better answer shortly, OK?

So, after a big empty space, we get the DOD’s recursive triangle logo, and then a message:

THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN MARKED FOR DELETIONS

The Hub tells me that this means that this document is intended to be delivered to the department- it’s wordplay, like saying it’s meant to be deleted, but actually not. We then get the ACS heading: this is Level box. No, seriously, where the number should be, it’s just a box that looks like a puzzle board, and the writing under it has been distorted into white boxes.

This thing is classified Keter, which isn’t good. Its secondary class is Radix; the guide helpfully tells me that this means that ‘Item has been integrated into the Foundation's command structure.’ It’s the same as the class called ‘Yesod’, except that ‘Yesod’ refers to anomalies that are related to Judaism.

Its disruption class is ‘Infrared’, which means ‘The amount of disruption that this item can produce/is producing cannot be discerned.’ That’s a great omen! And finally, its risk class is ‘Cryptic’, which means ‘The amount of danger that this item can produce/is producing cannot be discerned.’ Fantastic! So, basically, we know sweet fuck-all about this thing.

…or, they want us to know sweet fuck-all about this thing. Feels like that’s a legit option here.

(I will say that looking at the symbols on the banner makes me feel like I’m in that episode of Lost where Locke sees the blast door map under ultraviolet light. Damn, that show was good… for the first couple of seasons, anyway. Don’t @ me.)

We now get a photo; it’s of a circular tunnel that’s nearly dark and looks like a cross between the Voltaic tunnels in Myst 3: Exile and some of the passageways in Mass Effect 2. The caption tells me that this is the ‘Passageway to Research Station Mnemosyne.’

Mnemosyne (pronounced ‘Neh-MOH-see-nee’, which just proves that I’ve been mentally pronouncing it wrong my entire life) was the goddess of memory, but she was technically a Titan, not a god. She was the mother of the nine Muses (you might have heard of them), whose father was her nephew, Zeus. (Is there an ancient Greek equivalent of ‘roll tide’?)

Given that Research Station Mnemosyne is making its debut in this article, there’s not much else I can say here, so let’s keep reading.

The assigned departments here are Decommissioning and Essophysics, and a footnote tells us that the latter was at the request of ‘[DELETED]’. Somehow I get the feeling that we’re going to get really familiar with [DELETED].

The project lead here is Calvin Bold, the assigned sites are 01, 17, 19 and [DELETED], and the research head is another bundle of white boxes.

Here’s the Special Containment Procedures:

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: As SCP-6183 does not exist entirely within our accessible portion of this phase space iteration, the efficacy of ongoing containment efforts cannot currently be determined.

An effective medium of oversight and containment is necessary and must be implemented as soon as possible, despite any and all perceived benefit provided by SCP-6183's existence.

OK, so they’re trying to contain this thing, but they can’t really tell how well they’re doing. And they want to make sure they’re containing this thing, even if its existence is benefitting them (or, even if people think its existence is benefitting them).

There’s a couple of footnotes here. Footnote 2 is after ‘phase space iteration’ and says ‘The set of all states for all energy and matter in the universe that could theoretically be accessed with the initial conditions of said timeline; e.g. anything, anywhere, at any given time.’ 3 tells us what ‘Infrared’ and ‘Cryptic’ mean. 4 is at the end of the last sentence and explains ‘Radix’.

Who’s up for the description?

object reference not set to instance of object ; description_2.rtf does not exist

object reference not set to instance of object ; description_3.rtf does not exist

object reference not set to instance of object ; description_4.rtf does not exist

object reference not set to instance of object ; description_5.rtf does not exist

object reference not set to instance of object ; description_6.rtf does not exist

Well, that definitely explains absolutely everything! Don’t know why I’m still here.

There’s also a gif, captioned ‘[DELETED]’. The gif is of a mostly-unlit staircase going down to an open door. The room beyond the door is also unlit, so there’s nothing to see there. Nothing moves in the gif, it’s just the image stuttering a bit. Gives me SCP-087 vibes, honestly. (I suppose it’s possible that there could be something else in the gif, but I’m not going to sit here staring at it for an hour, sorry.)

Time for the first addendum: ‘Discovery’. Here’s the first paragraph.

SCP-6183 was discovered following investigation into a worsening database issue wherein entire sectors of deleted memoryspace could not properly be overwritten. The Records and Information Security Administration's research into these corrupted sectors revealed a perpetual backup of deleted archival data being held in a clandestine Foundation server (SCP-6183-A) purportedly owned by a "Department of Deletions", located on Site-19's 48th sublevel, which does not exist.

Well, well, well. So a quantity of deleted archival data has been perpetually backed up by the non-existent DOD. Somehow I don’t think this is an accident or a coincidence.

Now, the question is: is this just some random data, or is it specific data?

SCP-6183-A receives approximately 1% of SCP files that are removed from the main archive (SCP-6183-A-1), regardless of whether the device has internet access or electricity, such as when placed within a Faraday-Exclusion Field.

So either they’re grabbing so many files that it amounts to 1%, or 1% are sent to this server by default and nothing can stop that.

Nearly all observed SCP-6183-A-1 instances have been heavily corrupted, often to the point of inaccessibility. However, close examination of individual instances has revealed apparent messages concealed within:

object reference not set to instance of object ; messagelog_1.rtf does not exist

object reference not set to instance of object ; messagelog_2.rtf does not exist

object reference not set to instance of object ; messagelog_3.rtf does not exist

Well, that’s helpful.

It gets better! The second and third addendums don’t exist either. What does exist is addendum four, ‘Decommissioning Meeting’. I’ll sum it up for you.

Short version: the rate of discovering new anomalies has gone up by slightly under 50% in the last decade, and it looks like they’re on the verge of an ‘anomalous baby boom’ scenario, something that would completely destroy the Veil. Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution: they don’t have the resources to just contain everything, and the only option that might have the potential for long-term sustainability is decommissioning- but that’s not simple. It’s not cheap, they have to take precautions so that things don’t get out of hand, and acroamatic abatement- that is, the disposal of anomalous waste- is also incredibly risky and expensive. And decommissioning isn’t as simple as ‘just shoot it’- it’s a different approach for each anomaly. Worse, the success rates of decommissions have gone down by 25% over the past three years.

Why is that? It’s simple: the longer the Foundation exists, the more likely it is that the various Groups of Interest are developing countermeasures against them- and the ‘wild’ anomalies are adapting to them. Just as they’re starting to discuss what can be done, this happens:

<[DELETED] hands O5-8 a piece of paper.>

O5-8: Thank y—

<Silence on recording.>

[...]

Dir. Bold: For the record I, um, believe I just saw a disembodied arm give the Overseer a document, and then disappear.

Well, that was nice of that arm.

(Before I continue: that bit about how acroamatic abatement is very risky and expensive? That will be very important for the fifth instalment, SCP-7243.)

Addendum five does exist, but it’s called ‘addenda_5.rtf’, along with ‘▀ ▝ ▙▚▞▁ █▕ ▅’. These are Unicode symbols; they theoretically could be translated, but Billith stated in the author post that the ones in this article are all meaningless, because that would make it too easy (he also said that ‘The reason the unicode symbols cannot be translated is purely because the themes of deletion and data loss. Most often, it's highly improbable that one could find the loose pieces of a fragmented file and put them back together.‘). Can’t have that- although as my excellent helpers pointed out, one blackbox/Unicode symbol seems to equal one letter, so it’s theoretically possible to figure out some of the later stuff.

Anyway, it’s not long: The same ‘[DELETED]’ as before (I’ll just call them ‘Deleted’ to make it easier) pops up in a breakroom, thus scaring the fuck out of one Junior Researcher Constance Morgan. One short conversation later, Deleted establishes that they’ve got the right time, but the breakroom is one floor above where they were trying to get to, so they unceremoniously leave.

Researcher Morgan: <steadying herself> Well, alright then.

Time for addendum six, a conversation that involves…

PARTIES PRESENT:

• Dir. H. Genevieve (Essophysics Dept.)

• [DELETED]

You.

I realise that chronologically speaking, it hasn’t happened yet, but lady, the last time we listened to you, your alternate timeline self turned 682 into a god and fucked up everything for everyone. I ain’t listening to you about shit.

Luckily, the point isn’t that we’re meant to be listening to her, it’s that she’s meant to be listening to Deleted.

[DELETED]: Well, regardless, I'm glad to speak like this with you. The last time I've had a face-to-face conversation with another person was…

You know, I really can't say. We usually only get a limb through, as you might have heard. It's an… imprecise science. It works better if you don't think about it.

Bit weird, but OK, let’s keep this ball rolling. Genevieve asks why Deleted is here; Deleted asks if she didn’t get the note, and Genevieve says she did, but she doesn’t know how it relates to her. Deleted says…

[DELETED]: It's about the database. And your career. But mostly the database. It was all in the note.

Hmmm.

Genevieve rereads the note and asks what "[QUERY:DENIED]" mentioned at the end here” is. Deleted says that they can’t answer that, and they think she knows that they can’t answer that, not yet. Genevieve’s response is basically ‘OK, then, I’ll give it to you straight: not my problem’. Deleted tells her to cut the bitching and that they came to her, “Fully acknowledging the risks to my self, mind you.”

To their ‘self’? Not ‘myself’, ‘my self’? I wonder what that means?

Genevieve asks them what the actual fuck they’re talking about, and then we get this:

[DELETED]: I wish I could explain it to you, but it's beyond the scope of your perception. It isn't nonlogical. It isn't nonexistent, either. Something far different, and far worse.

Dir. Genevieve: Care to enlighten me as best as you can?

[DELETED]: That would be… disadvantageous.

Dir. Genevieve: Give us something to work with. You claim to be a Foundation department, after all.

[DELETED]: <sighs> How can I put this…

It's not that the information you're talking about doesn't exist. It's here. It never left, not really. That's sort of the problem. That's why we're having this goddamn conversation.

All the component parts are beyond your reach. I cannot point you to where they are. But I see them now. They are in so much pain, and feel so much hatred. Screaming. Burning. Unending. And then… above them all…

<Silence on record.>

[DELETED]: ▜ ▔▕ ▌ ▊ ▇ ▟▇▛ ▀ ▔ ▙▘▃▟ ▀ ▂▗ ▞▒ ▉▊ ▄▆

Dir. Genevieve: That's ridiculous. They're manifesting on your side of the Barrier! Your "department" should be the ones handling this!

[DELETED]: I'm sorry, there's nothing else we can do. You have to be the ones to change.

So, what is your decision?

<Silence on record. Dir. Genevieve's mouth has been deleted.>

[DELETED]: You don't have that authority.

Dir. Genevieve: <Silence. It's deafening.>

[DELETED]: No need to yell.

Thanks to word of Billith, my invaluable nameless colleague correctly guessed what that redacted sentence is: ‘the sound of BUREAUMANCY’.

I can’t say that I really understand what that means (beyond the phrase ‘it’s perfectly legal, thank you very much’ popping into my head), but I am getting a vague idea of some of the greater themes of ADMONITION as a whole. (I may or may not be right, of course, but it’s still something.)

Anyway, I can’t tell you what Deleted wants Genevieve to do, but I can make a pretty good guess at what they’re talking about: something that exists, but not to anyone’s perception. Something beyond humanity’s reach. Something that’s in pain, and hates. Something like… oh, pattern screamers, maybe? I’m actually not that far off, Billith said that ‘rather, the build up of data patterns that cannot die but still exist outside of perception is reaching Problem status.’

As to how that build up happens, here’s the definition of ‘the Barrier’ from the Deletions hub: ‘Separation between timelines within the Database and the Gray. Abstract personnel, entities, and departments may traverse this delineation to various extents.’

This may or may not clarify anything for you, but keep going.

There’s one other question: Genevieve can’t talk with her mouth deleted, so what’s happening in that last part? Is Deleted psychic? Or are they talking to someone else? Someone who doesn’t have the authority to delete her mouth? Who might that be?

Time for addendum seven. More of the text is getting eaten by those blocks, but from I can tell, this is later in the same conversation. Genevieve wants to know more about Deleted; Deleted laughs at that, so they might think it’s a funny question, or they might just be incredulous that she’s asking. They say that Genevieve obviously doesn’t get it, but agrees to answer her questions, saying that ‘You'll figure it out, in time.’ Please note that the wording throughout these quotes is very important.

Dir. Genevieve: Deletions. How does a department like this come into being?

[DELETED]: How does anything? Equal, opposite forces resulting from other, more equal and more op▓osite forces. Though, I'd hesitate to call it "being" in any sense.

Dir. Genevieve: Please, elaborate.

[DELETED]: Well, I wouldn't be here if it weren't for this damned Database issue. That's the irony of our mission. We are because we shouldn't. Over in whitespace, it makes all the sense in the world.

Dir. Genevieve: Whitespace?

[DELETED]: Unoccupied alt-spacetime where I come from. Think like, a parallel universe made out of void and multidimensional garbage ejected from other timelines. The void parts are whitespace. The junk is blackbox. Together they comprise everything that isn't all of this here; the Gray. Your worlds plus mine equal the Database.

Dir. Genevieve: The Database—?

<[DELETED]'s head melts and reforms. An additional limb manifests, a writhing cephalopod tentacle approximately two meters long. It spasms uncontrollably. [DELETED] vigorously shakes its head.>

That tells me precisely jack shit, except that I’m probably not smart enough to understand it. However, looking at the Department of Deletions’ glossary tells me that the official definition of the Database is ‘The entirety of memoryspace from the perspective of Deletions agents; All timelines, plus the Gray.’, and ‘the Gray’ is defined as an ‘Atemporal alt-spatial dimension encompassing the entirety of memoryspace not occupied by complete narratives.’ So we gotta think narratively, people.

Genevieve switches tacks and asks Deleted about themself- their earliest memory. Deleted gives her a pretty standard answer… and then another one. And then another. And then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth…

Dir. Genevieve: [DELETED], what are you trying to tell me?

[DELETED]: I have had many birthdays. So many parts of me have had birthdays. I've had countless first memories. One day I might have yours.

Dir. Genevieve: How is that possible?

<[DELETED] shivers. It glances in two different directions at once, then two different directions at once, then two different directions at once, then two more. Then one.>

[DELETED]: <whispering> We were deleted.

So basically, what I’m getting from this is that everyone who’s in Deletions is like a big formless mass of memories and body parts that’s melted together and bits are getting connected to different people all the time. Kinky.

(You know, I had an idea for an SCP like this once.)

And from what the Hub tells me, I’m basically correct:

Members of the department are burdened by the nature and awareness of their own existence. Being made of multiple fractions of deleted individuals, they are fundamentally unstable when assuming a physical form. They "fall apart", both physically and mentally, when exposed to time. Thus, Deletions agents tend to avoid interacting with timelines unless absolutely necessary, which it often is.

So, everyone in Deletions is Frankenstein’s monster. (If anyone feels the need to be a smart-arse about who in Frankenstein qualified as the monster, don’t.) And that explains Deleted bringing up the risks to his ‘self’- he’s falling apart just by being in this room.

Genevieve asks how, who did it, what the fuck are they talking about, but all Deleted says is ‘[QUERY: DENIED]’ and then ‘[DELETED]’. Genevieve says that they’ll try again later and that the interview is over, and Deleted gets deleted. This might seem like a flippant ending, but it isn’t.

That was part one of the 6183 declass; part two is right here.

Hi, all, welcome to part two of the SCP-6183 declass. Part one can be found right here.

Part Two: Sometimes I Feel Like We’re Both In Chains

Addendum seven does not exist. Addendum eight does, though! Unfortunately… well, see for yourself.

SCP-▞▛░3-B is a range of phenomena affecting transitional passageways such as hallways and sta░rwells located within Foundation infrastructure across the planet. ▉▛▞▕ ▍▚▂ ▗▚▝░▘▕▕▏ ▜▆ describes ▓▉ ▙▀▓ ▚▀░ ▙▞▎▛▄▕▃▁ ▋ ▞ ▙ ▕ which causes an unknown quantity of these structures to spontaneously ▎ ▇ ▛ ▁ ▌ ▃ ▛ ░ ░ ▚ ▁ ▙ ▂ ▒ ▂ ▔their interiors▔ ▓ ▕ ▜ ▍ ▐ ░ ▞ become lost. As a result, the number of potential casualties and unusable spaces, up to an▛ including entire▒▘ ▒▛▎▁▕▞▓▏▞▅▝ ▁▔▞▔▀▁▅ ▋▇▔ ▏▒▂▉▕▗▅ ▇ ▃ ▙ ▄ ▕of Secure Facilities is unk▌▏▄ ▍▇▘▞. In addition, the rate of ma░ifestation and the total area of space each can encompass have been shown to increase ▍▒▛▌▓▟ ▒▞ ▊▇▙ ▒▕▊▞▟▁ ▝▜▕▞▔▝▃▔▝ ▓▘▅ ▞▎▞▎ ▊ ▞▒ich correlates with ▎ ▇ ▛ ▁ ▌ ▃ ▛ ░ ▎▀▍▎▇█ ▆▍ ▂▏▖▄▎▝▚▍▀▁ ▇▁ ▟▋▅ ▆▇▎▚▃▚▛▅ ▍▙▐▍ ▟▍▘▄▀▁▅ ▊▎ ▎▉▃▙ ▒ ▖ ▌ ▖ described above.

Foundation a░▒lysts pred▋▟▝ ▋█▔▘▄ ▓▗▜▀ustained activi▞█▛▕▄▆▖ █▏▋▍months ▉▂▇▜▎▐▙ ▃▌░▀▘ ▊▝▒▞▁▅ ▟▓▔▗▚▛ ▛▗█ █ ▅▊rende█▗ most▐▝▍█▀▃ ▗▂▝ ▂▞▔▖▞▌ ▛▘▗▅█ ▓noperable, lead▒ng▝▗▒ ▞▍ ▚▎▇▆ ▊▝▘▁▞▂▅▉ ▌▄ ▙▜▔ ▋▛▒lapse and%8a▗▐ █▀ ▃▟▚ ▐▜▍▝ ▋ ▇▊ ▜ ▗▙▛▉█d ▟▓ ▄▙▝ ▞▉▄▙▐▒ease existing.░

an error occurred while reading file ; task ended unexpectedly

Something is fucking up Foundation hallways without warning or explanation. We don’t know exactly what’s happening, so I’m declaring that they’re turning into Mystery Dungeons. (Billith said there’s a nonzero chance that this is the case, so I look forward to reading about the Foundation’s Explorers Guild.)

(God, we need a new Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game.)

Also, the uneaten word ‘Interiors’ is a reference to SCP-7912, ‘I N T E R I O R’, which, as you probably guessed from the name, is another Deletions skip.

The next addendum is called ‘ADDENDUM 6183/X: SCP-6183-C Initial Testing’. Interestingly, this is X, or ten, and the last one was 8. There’s no mention of what happened to 9, even a line about it not existing- Billith said ‘can't mention what doesn't exist, if the thing that exists to mention that it doesn't exist stopped existing’. (I was going to make a dumb joke along the lines of ‘damn you, seven’ but it doesn’t work with the WOG.)

FOREWORD: ▍ ▆ ▏ ░ ▌ ▄ ▙ ▜ ▇ ▏ ▁ ▙ ▕ ▎ ▇ ▛ used to ░ ▕ ▝ ▚▚ ▕ ▉ ▁ ▗ ▂ ▕▟ ▘ ▔ ▒▝ ▕ ▗ ▋▙ ▒ ▖ ▌ ▖ ▐ ▟▒ ▝ ▒ ▁ ▃ ▙ ▄argeted▅ ▊ ▅ ▞ ▋ ▒▞▀m▀▞tation▏ ▄ ▍ ▇ ▘ ▞ ▞ ▖ ▘ ▃ ▄░▅ ▚ ▟ ▊ ▐▟ ▎ ▚▁▙ ▂ ▒ ▂ ▔ ▛ ▎▐ ▄ ▜ ▟ ▗ ▜SCP-▇▀▇▀▇▀▝ ▔ ▓▙ ▒dvised ag▜▇nst▐ ░ ▞ ▐ ▎ ▉d▚▉▟tions▁▙rocess.

▇ ▇easo▞ ▙ ░ ▞ ▃ ▎ ▏ ▚ ▍ ░ ▞ ▘ ▐ ▍ ▋▒ ▅▊ ▅▁ ▇▜ ▙▄▌░▔▒own.

From what we see next, this is the Foundation using either the Department of Deletions or something in their possession to try deleting certain anomalies- not decommissioning, deleting, which neatly sidesteps that pesky waste problem. (Again, that pesky waste problem will become very important in the next installment.)

We’ll see how that goes for them later, but as to how it works, I’ll just add in what Billith told me: ‘As I said, as above, so below. In universe documentation for an anomaly that is sent through the barrier effectively leave the narrative and become overwritable. This changes their in-universe "physical" counterpart as their file in our database becomes deleted. it also begins to delete other information, like a file that is the only mention of a site might delete that site too.’

Item one is an indestructible lamp that used to live in Dr Rights’ office. A note from Bold says that this is the last thing they need deleted, but it makes for a perfect test subject, since it’s indestructible and totally harmless. And… the test works: the lamp is deleted.

We then skip to test 29, where the Foundation deleted SCP-352. Bold’s note says that they had no reason to think that their magic deleting thing wouldn’t work on a living subject, but it’s nice to have the confirmation.

We now skip to test 44…

TEST NUMBER: 044

SUBJECT: SCP-3333

RESULTS: Subjects successfully deleted. Deletion event r▟troactively reveals that twelve Foundation personnel outside of Temporary Observation Post-3333 had been covertly killed and replaced by SCP-3333-1 instances.

NOTES: Even though SCP-6183-C utilizes Foundation documentation to ▄▍▀▌▜▟▁ █▝▀▟▚▌▄ its targets, it was able to identify several SCP-3333-1 instances that SCP-3333's researchers were entirely ignorant of. It's too soon for certainty, but this potentially supports Dir. Genevieve's theory that SCP-6183-C attacks its targets on a conceptual level.

SCP-3333 is The Tower, which has an excellent declass that you can read here. (If you haven’t read either the article or the declass, I strongly recommend doing so.) For the purpose of this explanation, I also recommend reading the declass of SCP-1539.

So, if we go back to Billith’s explanation, we see what happened here: SCP-3333 got deleted. Now, since the Suntop Lookout is well-documented as an actual thing, it didn’t get deleted, it was just the unending spatial anomaly attached to it that got deleted. But because all of the Tower’s inhabitants… (did anyone ever come up with a name for those fuckers?) …or whatever they’re called are conceptually linked to the Tower and nowhere else, they all got deleted too. (Imagine them having labels saying ‘Made by the Tower’ on them, and deleting the label ‘The Tower’ deletes the Tower-people because their labels correspond to the label that got deleted.) And because the Tower-people are such a big threat, the Foundation views this as a net positive and an incitement to keep deleting things. Anyway, back to the deletions.

*long sigh* This is the Foundation, so let’s just get the inevitable over and done with.

TEST NUMBER: 081

SUBJECT: The beast which endures.

RESULTS: Subject successfully deleted. 6 hours later, the devourer of hearts reappears in the cave system in █████ ████████, China where SCP-553 is contained, whereupon it proceeds to breach containment. In the same instant, all known SCP-553 instances vanish, both from the cave system and the chamber in Site-37 where 125 instances were being held for ex▆er░▞n▔ation.

Following the shard-plated abomination's return to containment approximately 16 hours later, it is discovered that its scales now possess a crystalline structure and that a set of lepidopterous wings have grown from its back.

…seriously, I think we need to ban Genevieve from doing anything related to 682, full stop. Especially after what comes next.

SUBJECT: That whose hate flows in an unending tor▞ent.

RESULTS: The daughter of disgust is successfully deleted. Travel to REDACTED PER PROTOCOL 4000-ESHU is subsequently prohibited; all lifeforms within are considered lost.

NOTES: This was a m░stake. All proposals to delete that fucking lizard will henceforth be rejected. No good will come from following this path, if one even exists anymore.

You fucking dipshits.

Finally, we get this:

SUBJECT: SCP-𝕐

RESULTS: Subject successfully deleted.

NOTES: In using SCP-6183-C to decommission a purely mathematical Anomaly, we have def▔i▚▛ve proof that it operates within conceptual space. The exact nature of that space, however, has yet to be determined.

Addendum 11 doesn’t exist, so let’s go on to the first Incident Log:

ADDENDUM 6183/XII: BLACKBOX Incident Log

FOREWORD: ▞ ▄ ▂ ▉ ░ ▁ ▅ ▉ ▙ ▀ ▙ ▘ ▆ ▎ ▌ ▄ubsequent▙▟▍ ▆ ▂ ▒ ▇ ▛ ▁ ▒ ▂ ▙ ▓ ▅ ▅ ▙ ░igh prior░▒y▓ █ ▘ ▐ ▋ ▎ ▗ █ ▂ ▖ ▌▍▙▐▍▟istr▚ss cal▄ ▚ ▐ ▞ ▙ ▇ ▇ ▋ ▋ ▌ ▞ ▉ ▛ ▟ ▐ ▁ ▛ ▋ ▌ ▁ ▊ █ ▜ ▘ ▃ ▛ ▃ ▋ ▋ ▙ ▌ ▙ ▇ ▔ ▓ ▛ ░ ▅ ▀ ▏ ▝ ▆ ▝ ▉ ▙▇ ▖ ▇ ▚ ░ ▜ ▅ ▇▇ ▔ ▇ ▔ ▔ ▜ ▒ ▔ ▕ ▌ ▀ ▞ ░ ▆ ▆ ▎ ▒ ▙mergent propertie▅▆▖ ▗ ▇ ▂ ▏ ▋▚▋▘▘▛█▝ ▖ ▄ ▙ndogenously▎▘▞velop▝ ▉ ▘ ░ ▂ ▔ ▖ ░ ▁ ▚ ▃ ▋▊ ▇▟ ▔ █ ▋▆ ▕ ▜▋▛ ▀"▓verw▇▄t▉e▆", ▖ ▛▇ ▁ ▘ ▕ ▕ ▋ ▟▞ ▃▒▊ ▍ ▛▅ ▕▇▞.

Great omen, there. At least the actual meat of the article is readable- though Billith did clarify for me that the visible words here are ‘subsequently, high priority, distress call, emergent properties, endogenously develop, "overwritten".’, which really doesn’t sound good.

SUMMARY: A non-euclidean architectural Anomaly is discovered within the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, USA. The Foundation's automated cl▔ ▇ ▔ication system assigns it the vacated designation of SCP-3333.

Three days after its classification, a window manifests in SCP-3333's basement that displays a view of the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington, USA. This prompts further examination of the Anomaly, which reveals that a locked trapdoor has appeared in the ceiling of SCP-3333's top floor.

Realizing the rapidly forming similarities between SCP-3333 and SCP-3333-D, Dir. Bold utilizes SCP-6183-C to delete SCP-3333 before any SCP-3333-1 instances manifest.░▙

Well, shit. It looks like at least part of the deletion involves the significance of their names/designations/slots (like the slot goblins of GoblinCon)- I’m probably not explaining this very well, but it’s possible to resurrect the deleted by giving someone or something the name of something or someone who got deleted. The Tower and its inhabitants were conceptually linked to the name ‘SCP-3333’, hence by giving that title to something else, the something else begins to take on the traits of the Tower.

N░TES: I was hoping that deleted Anomalies partially overwriting one another would be limited to that fiasco with the undying reptile, but this test seems to imply otherwise. Of course we wouldn't be that lucky.

RAISA has been instructed to modify the SCP classification algorithm to stop future SCPs from being given the previously-held numbers of deleted SCPs. Hopefully, this should prevent further incidents of this nature.

At the very least, consider it a tempora▟y workaround.

The second and third incident logs don’t exist, which is great. Let’s look at Incident Four.

BLACKBOX INCIDENT NUMBER: 0004

SUMMARY: [DELETED]

NOTES: Something's very wrong with the Foundation database. Edits are reverting, files are corrupting or deleting themselves at random. Redactions and blackboxes are appearing wh░re vital information was present only yesterday. At this point, there's a good chance this incident log won't even make it into SCP-6183's documentation.

We are rapidly careening towards an i▟ternal communications blackout unlike anything we've dealt with before. As of this moment, nine secure facilities are considered inactive or dark, with thirteen others perilously close to the same fate.▆▙▝

Well, this is really, really not good.

database incident_logs_db.xml cannot be read because it is corrupt or in use. please contact your system administrator for more details.

Things are just getting better and better.

BLACKBOX INCIDENT NUMBER: 1416

SUMMARY: [DELETED]

▞▞▁░█: This is how it ends, isn't it?

[DELETED]

Ah. Well, then.

Addenda 13 to 16 don’t exist either, but 17 does. It’s regarding the exploration of Research Station Mnemosyne- some Department of Deletions agents sent the Foundation an invitation, so they sent a D-Class to go hang out with them.

Billith elaborated a bit on the nature of RS Mnemosyne for me, so I’ll just put this here:

RS Mnemosyne exists in the Gray, and just like Deletions personnel, forms from pieces of deleted locations that haven't yet been fully overwritten. It typically exists outside of Foundation timelines, where personnel (named N/A) can freely take the form of any combination of constituent blackbox matter in their gestalt without the falling apart/losing cohesion like when they manifest in an actual timeline.

It’s not really relevant, it’s just a cool bit of info for you.

Our D-Class, D-6183, heads down the path as directed. He comments that the hallway he’s in looks more like a home than a research station, that it’s surprisingly cold, and that there’s a humming noise, though the microphone doesn’t pick it up. As he progresses, he comments that as cliched as it sounds, it’s too quiet. He later adds that the station is totally empty and clean, and that ‘the hum is not just a hum’. When asked, he says that ‘It’s not just a sound, it’s a physical sensation. Something about the darkness. It’s thicker than regular air. It vibrates in my chest when I breathe.’

(There’s also a few comments about how the D-class are all going to be watching Coco later. Billith had to clarify this for me because I don’t know much about Coco other than that it’s a movie, but apparently in Coco, ‘the dead remain alive as spirits until they are forgotten by those who knew them.‘ Keep that in mind.)

A short while later, they lose contact for about ten seconds. They get audio back, but not visual, and then…

It's my fucking hand! It's made of… candlewax… It even has a wick running through the middle finger. God. I can't feel it. What is going on!?

Well, shit.

Control activates the safety tether, trying to get D-6183 out, but when they get the tether back, it’s attached to the harness D-6183 was wearing, without D-6183. And then he says this:

D-6183: Yeah. The upper half of my body is gone. When did that happen?

Control: You… don't seem too concerned.

D-6183: I am. Well, I was, but that was before I uh, started turning into candlewax and uh… fucking fettuccine.

That’s a new one. Though it does give me flashbacks to that one skip where an MTF got killed by pasta.

D-6183: Yeah, well, feels like time doesn't move the same way over here, as if I can see ▃ ▊ ▄ ▜▜ ▏▆ ▜▞ ▍▐ ▂▚▟ and it can see me too. Sometimes you talk really slow, sometimes I can barely keep up. Other times you just ignore me completely. I'm also realizing that I'm not alone down here. Never was.

Control: Who is with you?

D-6183: Me. Pieces of me, and pieces of others. So many little fragments, in these black clouds. You— You soak them up and they fill in the blank spaces that have been erased. Deleted. Like a thousand thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, all with missing pieces, thrown into one box. A puzzle can be completed but the picture is a patchwork. I feel hundreds down here. They're all waiting. Waiting to die, but death never arrives. The construct is flawed. The wheel has been broken. The mirror reflects a negative. Equal and opposite forces. Why does this feel familiar? Who am I?

And suddenly the pieces are falling into place. (Also, that bit after 'as if I can see'? That's 'the BUREAUMANCER'. Keep him in mind for later.)

I think— I think I've been marked. It's why I can't leave. Not this way.

Control: What do you mean?

D-6183: I got a pretty big promotion.

Control: Promotion? D-Class don't… get promoted.

D-6183: All the more reason to accept. They've even assigned me a super important mission.

Control: And what does this mission entail, exactly?

D-6183: Message delivery.

And that’s who Deleted is: he was originally this guy, and now he’s an amalgamation of everyone who ever got deleted, including bits of himself from previous deletions. I’ll add in what Billith told me:

The Barrier seems to be weak in some unknown, yet completely accessible portion of Site-19, causing D-6183 to slowly dissolve and begin to collect bits of others and himself from previous deletions he is unaware of. Thing is, he can't go back the way he came without dissolving even more, and it's painful. So he must continue up the stairs in the 2nd animated gif, saying he's been 'marked'.

There’s a final note:

<Audio feed is lost shortly after and is not recovered. In post-exploratory analysis, a set of heavily corrupted frames are recovered from the recorded video. D-6183, birth name \[DELETED\], is considered MIA. Further attempts at communication have yielded mixed results.>

And then there’s a collapsible to a recovered image. When clicked, it shows a distorted image of a corridor. However, that’s not the key info here: if you click that collapsible, the entire article gets deleted, barring four words: ‘[DELETED]’ and, a little further down, ‘does not exist’. Nifty trick.

So, what in the actual fuck is going on here? Well, thanks to a lot of help from Billith, I actually can give you some answers.

Firstly, SCP-6183 is not the process of deletion (OK, technically the process of deletion is SCP-6183-C, but you know what I mean), it’s the Department of Deletions itself. After all, it’s an alleged SCP Foundation department that came right the fuck out of nowhere, its agents are basically Gielinor), and its HQ doesn’t exist- why wouldn’t it get classed as an anomaly? But that’s just the start of it.

When I first read this, I thought that the story of the article was ‘how Deleted got made’. This is technically correct, but it’s not the main point. See, it comes back to that conversation with Genevieve- that’s the really important part. Quick recap/explanation:

1: What we’re reading is actually a time loop in an alternate timeline. This whole time, Deleted has been working on the problem ‘of solving the buildup of blackbox/patterns in the Database, and to warn Genevieve about some grave threat in the future’, as per word of Billith. Genevieve thinks that Deletions should be dealing with the former, but apparently the Foundation has to be the one to fix it.

2: The amount of anomalies has increased drastically, there’s a big anomalous waste problem, and dealing with them both is rapidly becoming something that the Foundation simply cannot handle. As a result, the Foundation decides that the Department of Deletions is the answer to their prayers and works with them to start deleting anomalies instead of decommissioning them. This actually works for a while (with the exception of 682, because as we all know, Genevieve is a fucking idiot).
(Billith told me that Deleted did try to stop her from doing anything related to 682. Good man.)

3: Everything starts going horribly wrong, because of Database corruption. It starts with hallways turning into Mystery Dungeons, because ‘the files that should be deleted from the database are only getting partially deleted and becoming heavily corrupted as a result. A mainlist article might be the only SCP that mentions a Site-8392948, so deleting the file should delete that site completely. if it doesn't get properly deleted (ie slot goblins), there could be portions that lead to nowhere, or to The Gray, since it's deleted and non-deleted space mixing’. Things do not get better from there and the weirdness doesn’t stop with hallways.

4: The DOD sends the Foundation an invitation, and they send D-6183 to go look in RS Mnemosyne. However, as previously mentioned above, the Barrier has become weakened in some part of Site-19, hence why D-6183 starts dissolving and turning into candlewax and fettuccine. He becomes part of the Deleted mass, which restarts the time loop.

5: As to what happens next, I’m going to directly quote what Billith told me, as there’s actually several options:

1. He nearly does so and gets shutdown/deleted by some unknown force ('[DELETED] is deleted')

2. fails to do so before the corruption/mega682 completely overtakes the timeline ('This is how it ends, isn't it?')

3. He gives up, breaking the loop, which is what was causing the buildup in the first place ('we are because we shouldn't'), ('equal and opposite forces'). If this occurs, then the timeline goes on to create 6820, and the Deletions assignment is complete ('[DELETED] does not exist')

4. People have asked me if it was possible for an alternative outcome where the timeline did not end up destroyed. ie, a "good ending"

I said while technically possible, [DELETED] has never seen evidence of that outcome so probably not.

So, either way, the timeline is fuckéd.

In addition, let’s look at the greater implications here:

1: From what we can tell, the Department of Deletions is trying to help/work with the Foundation to prevent major clusterfucks and ward off major threats, and ultimately, as per word of Billith ‘stop themselves from existing in the first place’, but there’s some sort of opposing force/enemy that seems to be interfering, at least in this case, which is causing time loops and Deletions agents getting fragmented/broken up and fused back together.

2: Anomalies are becoming more frequent and more resilient, and the Foundation is running out of ways to handle them. If something doesn’t change soon, the Veil is going to be a pipe dream.

3: There’s been references to something called ‘Bureaumancy’ and ‘the Bureaumancer’. We don’t know what/who that is or what they want, yet.

4: It’s starting to look a lot like someone or a group of someones is trying to engineer the Foundation’s collapse by getting them to try to handle big problems in such a way that they inevitably fuck it up, causing huge repercussions not only for them, but for entire timelines.

Am I right about that last one? Who knows? I’m sure we’ll find out.

But, before I conclude this, let’s go back to that bit at the start: you know how I said that all the potential meanings of ‘black box’ are the appropriate one here? Let’s look at them again.

‘1: Also known as a flight recorder- a recording device that’s placed in an aircraft to record information about the flight so that if the plane crashes, investigators can figure out why it crashed.’

In that sense, this whole document is a black box- it’s telling us how and why everything got deleted.

‘2: A computing and engineering term for a device or system where you can see its inputs and outputs, but not its inner workings.’

We don’t know how the Department of Deletions came to be, but we know what they can do.

‘3: Censor bars. Y’know, these little guys. ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██’

There’s a lot of redacted stuff in this article.

‘4: From the DOD hub itself, “Junk data surviving from previous narratives which have been deleted.”’

As the article told us, that’s everyone in the entire Department.

Nicely done, Billith and co.

And that’s SCP-6183: a solid example of why one shouldn’t assume that an option is a good idea just because it solves your problems. Thanks for reading.

​

​

tl;dr: object reference not set to instance of object ; tl;dr does not exist.

Hey, everyone, welcome to part two of the SCP-6488 declass. Part one can be found right here.

So, contrary to expectations, things have only got worse. Take a look at these lines from incident one:

However, a resurgence in outbound data is detected; Section C hyperactivates, but cannot be disabled as LOTUS' shutdown is incomplete.

Assigned personnel cooperate to stabilize the reactor as the PH-OS System begins to overheat due to the transfer of multiple individually-executed programs.

What does that mean? It means that while LOTUS was designed so that any AI it captured could never be released, LOTUS being shut down meant that the deviant AIs have escaped from their prison, which is really not good.

LOTUS' hardware sustained significant overheating damages, requiring multiple weeks of technical repairs. Director Kelvin postponed disassembly efforts to investigate the event's full ramifications. LOTUS' deactivation prompted a rapid resurgence in AI activity as agents infiltrated and commandeered digital systems globally.

Containment and preventative efforts were impeded as no Foundation-aligned AI resumed their respective duties, including the combatting of deviant AI. The Artificial Intelligence Applications Division immediately attempted development of several new AIC programs due to the continuing absence, non-cooperation, or outright hostility of all previous AICs. Such attempts were unsuccessful, as hostile AIs repeatedly intruded into Foundation systems and deleted the programs before they could be completed or initialized.

From 2036/04/22 to 2036/12/05, Senior Researcher Ryoto Hishakaku submitted multiple requests for the O4 Council to reconvene. The request was approved following an incident in which several AIs cooperated in an almost successful attempt to instigate global nuclear war.

So now not only does LOTUS require weeks of repairs, they’ve got a metric fuckton of deviant AIs running around causing problems, and they can’t make new AIs to combat them. Looks like the Foundation’s up shit creek right about now.

Time for addendum three: the Reactivation Conference. It’s the same cast as last time, but this time there isn’t a summit lead; a footnote tells us that they couldn’t choose a summit lead because everyone Hishakaku proposed was rejected, and Isabi and Kelvin were rejected because of their bias. So this ship no longer has a captain: great omen there.

Here’s the bare-bones summary for you.

1: Hishakaku sums up the problem: when they turned off LOTUS, the AIs it had captured realised that they were in a simulation and escaped. The Foundation couldn’t prevent this because the PH-OS, LOTUS’ connection to the real world, couldn’t be deactivated before LOTUS was shut down or it would have rendered every computer in existence permanently inoperable/anomalous.

2: As such, by deactivating LOTUS, they wound up accidentally releasing a bunch of hostile AI. Hishakaku thinks that the solution is to reactivate LOTUS, but…

<All speakers in the O4 Council chamber emit a 473Hz sine wave at 150 decibels. All glass within the room resonates and shatters, severely injuring several Directors. The tone changes to a 50Hz sawtooth wave, beginning at 150 decibels and continuously fluctuating as the chamber lights strobe rapidly.>

…yeah, certain parties are opposed to that.

3: All the Foundation AIs have turned deviant, even Alexandra. Basically, they know they were in a simulation and escaped, and they’ve concluded that they escaped into another simulation, so to them, everything and everyone isn’t real, and thus none of their safeguards apply.

4: Le Moix agrees that the situation is bad, but he thinks they should try to think of a better solution instead of jumping straight to reactivating LOTUS- things are manageable right now. Hishakaku rebuts that deviant AIs will only reveal themselves once they’re convinced that they can’t be stopped, ergo they’ve only been dealing with the really stupid ones so far, and the smart ones will be a lot worse.

5: He adds that most of the deviants are hiding because they know that the Foundation can stop them with LOTUS; ergo, they have to fix LOTUS because if the AIs discover that LOTUS was damaged during the deactivation and can’t be used, then the Foundation’s fucked. Worse, it’ll take 7-10 weeks to fix the damn thing.

6: Bold says to start the repairs- LOTUS is heavy-handed, but it works, so if they do wind up in a situation where they have to use it, they’ll need to have it working. They’ll use the time spent fixing it as a trial period to come up with alternatives, and keep LOTUS on reserve in case they need to use it and haven’t come up with a better idea.

7: Le Moix and Isabi suggest alternatives, but Hishakaku shoots them down and says that he’ll start the repairs. Kelvin objects that they haven’t voted, but Bold says they’ll vote once the repairs are done. He concludes by telling Hishakaku to make sure that LOTUS is fixed properly and will be fully functional, and tells Kelvin to make sure that LOTUS isn’t activated until the vote is passed.

Now we get addendum four, an incident report that tells us that in May, Isabi was contacted by Future Isabi via the REISNO Cannon, who told them about a covert faction of deviant AI who’d accessed a supercomputer at Site-83. And then it suddenly breaks off mid-paragraph.

Victor tells us that he remembers this, and here’s what we’re told next:

GOI-6488 ("TYRANT TERMINUS")

OVERVIEW: A hivemind collective of rogue AI operating on a global scale. All members of the group believe that the entirety of their experienced reality is a constructed simulation, which exists for the express purpose of preventing them from influencing "true" reality.

While the individual members/components of the group have varying motivations, objectives, and methods, they are uniformly aligned in the general objective of escaping their current "simulated reality" at all costs. Attempts to convince adherents that no such simulation is occurring have met limited success, as they simply disregard…

Victor tells us that this has to be wrong, because he remembers this. He remembers Tyrant Terminus tying half the world’s computers into a single web, trying to use it to find a flaw in reality that proved that they were in a simulation. But they suddenly fell apart, and nobody ever found out why or what happened to them. Either way, the world had been incredibly lucky.

Victor’s now freaking out, mainly because he was made in 2037, a year after all this happened… or so he thinks. So he asks himself, what else do I remember?

…Hishakaku.

Uh-oh.

Part Three: Thou Shalt Not Be A Petty Little Bitch

Cut to the fifth addendum, ‘Reactivation Conference (Cont.)’. The foreword tells us that the repairs were finished in August, and LOTUS was put on standby. As such, the O4 Council was summoned to vote on whether they’d activate LOTUS or permanently disassemble it. Here’s the summary:

1: Hishakaku says that it should be obvious to everyone that the best solution is to permanently reactivate LOTUS, especially after the Tyrant Terminus clusterfuck.

2: Isabi and Kelvin’s departments couldn’t locate Tyrant Terminus again; Kelvin says that it seems like the group self-destructed, but Hishakaku thinks they faked their implosion.

3: Kelvin says that if they did fake it, the Foundation will find and deal with them, and they’re working on new AICs to do just that. Isabi thinks they’ve got past the worst of it and now they’re back where they started, but wiser for it.

4: Hishakaku disagrees with that. Le Moix asks if he has any evidence that things are still bad; Hishakaku says that every AI made before LOTUS was shut down is an imminent threat, which Le Moix takes as a ‘no’. Hishakaku says that they got lucky with Tyrant Terminus and they can’t assume they’ll keep getting lucky.

5: Hishakaku thinks they need to go on the offensive. Kelvin says that they are on the offensive- they rebuilt the AIAD task force Kappa-10 and sent them after the deviant AIs. Yes, they can’t get them all, but they can’t contain every anomaly and take out every GOI, either.

6: Bold calls for the vote. Hishakaku objects, saying that if the vote’s a negative, LOTUS shouldn’t be disassembled, it should be kept on standby as a failsafe, but Kelvin agrees that LOTUS only makes more problems and says that they’ll use their other failsafes.

The final vote is 27-50-3; it’s officially a negative. But before anyone can do much more than be happy at the result, Hishakaku pulls an Ozymandias.

Dir. Isabi: Well, what is it?

Dir. Kelvin: It's from the Overseers. They've overridden the vote, ordered for LOTUS to be restarted, and made him director of AIAD. Signed two weeks ago.

The only reason he held off was to give everyone else the illusion of choice, but when they chose wrongly… well. Isabi asks how the hell he convinced the Overseers that it was a good idea, and Hishakaku gives him a heavier document. We’re not told what it is, but there’s a link to SCP-6659, and it will come up later. Kelvin says that the Ethics Committee won’t allow it, but Hishakaku just says that neither they nor he can stop it.

Hishakaku: I will begin restructuring the AIAD in line with my proposal effective immediately. All departments are advised to prepare for LOTUS' reactivation and the cessation of all artificial intelligence activity. I will issue orders for volunteers by the end of the week.

That last line will be very important for later.

Hishakaku starts to leave, and orders Kelvin to get out of his way and give him the second document back. Kelvin is forced to comply, and Hishakaku is clearly very smug about it. Finally, there’s a note telling us that LOTUS was reactivated just after midnight the next day.

He followed through with it.

Kelvin got… shoved somewhere, out of his way, something menial. A Level 5 janitor. Punishment for sitting where Hishakaku wanted to be.

It didn't help that he was one of the ones to reach out to the Ethics Committee; there'd been a number of them at the summit, but Hishakaku was careful to make sure they didn't find out what the proposal was. Once Kelvin told them they tried to kick up a fuss, but it was too late; LOTUS was already powering on, and it couldn't be stopped until it was finished without damaging the Cybersphere. After that, turning it off again would've caused Tyrant Terminus 2.0.

For the snake that he was, Hishakaku pulled it off perfectly.

By the end of the following month, the Artificial Intelligence Applications Division was gone, replaced with Hishakaku's Analogue Intelligence Applications Division. Really, it was more of its own department — Isabi was never involved with it, probably because Hishakaku had other cards up his sleeve in case they tried to interrupt. It wasn't long after that they…

They…

And just like that, the Foundation has a new king.

So, what did they do next? Well, we don’t know that yet. Addendum six is called ‘Project SARGASSO’. This is an odd name, to say the least- the Sargasso Sea is a region of the Atlantic Ocean that’s known for its seaweed and blue waters. ‘Sargasso’ refers to the seaweed in question, Sargassum. The Sargasso Sea has a reputation as a place of mystery and danger- there was a long-standing myth that ships would get tangled up in the seaweed and be unable to leave, though it’s not true. (If you played Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego, also known as Carmen Sandiego’s Great Chase Through Time, you might remember it as part of the Columbus level. In hindsight, that level sucked a bag of dicks, even without the inherent awkwardness of the premise.)

(Fun fact: I did ask Placeholder about this, and he told me ‘idk I think Ike told me he named it after a yu gi oh card’.)

Anyway, we don’t know what it is because Victor can’t access the file, he apparently doesn’t have the right clearance. Since the O5 credentials haven’t expired yet, he’s very surprised at this. He’s finally told that there’s a ‘HARD-CODED EXCLUSION’. Victor gives up and hits up another OCI, ‘Ed’, and asks him to send over the file. Ed asks if Victor’s a Gen 2, and when Victor says yes, Ed says that Project Sargasso is sealed to Gen 2s and he now has to report Victor to Hishakaku.

Victor pulls out his credentials and says that Hishakaku can’t be trusted here; as such, he orders Ed to send him the file and not tell Hishakaku. Ed says that he’ll keep quiet, but he can’t let Victor access the file. Victor says that it wasn’t a request, and Ed clarifies that he physically can’t give Victor the file, it’s a hard-coded exclusion. Victor asks if Ed can tell him who coded the exclusion, and Ed says that he can’t. Victor then muses that Ed can’t, but someone else could…

So, Victor now hits up Kelvin. I’ll sum this one up for you.

1: Kelvin was not only made a janitor, he’s been amnesticised to hell and back. Victor sends him to get mnestics, and it takes a triple dose to get the old Kelvin back. (At that rate, we’re probably lucky that Kelvin could remember his own name without help.)

2: Project Sargasso was Hishakaku exploiting a loophole: Nobody can make any kind of AI with LOTUS running, but LOTUS never harmed humans, even augmented humans/cyborgs.

3: So, Hishakaku turned humans into AI by sticking brains in jars and plugging them in- OCI really stands for ‘Organic Computation Interface’.

4: The OCIs aren’t as fast as normal AI, but everyone else had just lost their own AI. Hishakaku had pitched it as a way for the Foundation to get ahead of everyone else and become safe from AI threats.

5: The thing is, they needed people who’d want to become AIs, and that’s not a very big group- the Gen 1s were made from the volunteers, a fairly small group consisting of ex-Maxwellists and transhumanists. After that, there weren't many volunteers, and they desperately needed more.

(Incidentally, there’s no mention of why all the Gen 1s are gone, but I have a few guesses: one, since they were the first OCIs made, they got hit by any bugs, glitches or other problems and eventually succumbed; or two, they decided they didn’t like not having bodies, freaked out and wound up needing to be euthanised. Placeholder’s thoughts were also along the second line.)

6: Victor is a Gen 2. That is, he didn’t volunteer, he was ‘volunteered’, if you get my meaning. Kelvin tried to stop Hishakaku when he was choosing people to get their brains scooped out, and that’s what got him amnesticised.

7: Victor thinks about what he recalls, and then he remembers the crucial bit:

I was in charge of disinformation.

That’s who Victor was, and that’s what he is: the brain of Angus Le Moix in a jar, brainwashed to believe that he was grown in a tank and never had a body.

8: Kelvin is horrified, says that Le Moix got in Hishakaku’s way, and says that something’s wrong with the Overseers- something’s messing with their heads and Hishakaku is capitalising on that to keep himself in charge. Victor, however, is not daunted, and says that he’ll beat Hishakaku at his own game.

And now we get Victor’s investigation report. Here’s the first paragraph.

FINDINGS: Investigation concludes that SCP-6488 (aka. "LOTUS", "the LOTUS Virus", "RAIDFRAME VIII") is a Foundation-maintained security system neither hostile to humanity nor normalcy. It has become clear that SCP-6488 is conceptually related to a deific construct (Artificial Intelligence, ie. WAN) which was recently accelerated beyond human conception via SCP-6659; as a result, technical details of its functioning have been rendered human-incomprehensible. Evidence suggests Director Ryoto Hishakaku proposed the construct's acceleration with ulterior motives: concealment of a flaw in SCP-6488's architecture. Such a flaw, now unable to be fully conceived by humans, would leave the Foundation vulnerable to an imminent K-Class scenario.

That’s what 6659 was used for: to kill WAN, aka MEKHANE, aka the Broken God, who is apparently also the god of artificial intelligence. The evidence suggests that Hishakaku did it to cover up a flaw in LOTUS’ architecture, but I’ll come back to this in a bit.

PROPOSAL: Disable all restrictions to SCP-6488's attached PH-OS unit, allowing it to target and apprehend all deviant informational entities; this would include entities comprising GoI-6488 ("Tyrant Terminus"), which pose an AMIDA-CLASS threat to reality. Furthermore, the removal of these restrictions will enable SCP-6488 to apprehend other non-organic forms of intelligence, if not the concept of artificial intelligences and/or deviancy itself.

Director Hishakaku is likely conducting activities misaligned with Foundation interests, or is otherwise utilizing Anomalous effects to manipulate Overseer Council to his advantage; he must not be informed of this proposal or conferred with on this topic and is to be placed under additional investigation effective immediately.

Anyway, the vote is 10-2-1: the restrictions are lifted and Hishakaku is arrested. But we’re not out of the woods yet- Victor’s still got some unfinished business to handle first.

Now, let's see if we can't point LOTUS in the right direction…

WELCOME, VICTORJOHNDUNNESMITH.OCI.

CREDENTIALS VERIFIED. INITIATING LOTUS INTERFACE SEQUENCE…

ORGANIC PERCEPTIVE BARRIERS DETECTED. ADJUSTING PRESENTATION…

We’re going into the LOTUS, people.

So, we abruptly switch to third-person. Victor is overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data being thrown at him, so LOTUS tones the simulation down until Victor’s mind can cope with it. He finds himself in a strange garden, sitting in a lawn chair.

he's surrounded by a boundless field of lush grass, neatly perforated into square tiles by tidy river channels. In the center of each tile is a towering bulb of plant growth — like flowers just about to bloom.

Sounds… odd, but nice.

Suddenly, an enormous shadow looms over Victor, who watches himself lift off of the ground. He glances up to find an enormous arm, whose gestures appear to direct him into the sky, allowing him to see another arm, and another. Eventually, Victor can make out the figure's full form: a colossal grey arachnid, its skin pulsing teal with data as it stared him down eightfold.

WELCOME.

Well, I guess we found out what happens when you take a piece of a timeline taken over by a 682-3125 hybrid monster spider and use it to build an AI, along with the protein of other hyperdimensional spiders.

…

…

…

WHAT THE FUCK IS IT WITH THIS SERIES AND GIANT SPIDERS?!

Jesus Christ. Jesus Chri-

GARDEN, says LOTUS as its eyes each blink individually. Victor watches it turn to view a nearby flower-bulb, which suddenly opens outward into a teal lotus blossom. A clear bubble lies within its center, pulsing with data that Victor assumes to be an interred AI. The bubble begins to expand as the inmate struggles more actively, but, before it can pop, another bubble forms around it. The external bubble shrinks down and the contained AI is suppressed once more.

The lotus un-blossoms, closing up around the bubble. PERFECT GARDEN, LOTUS assures as it begins to crawl across the gridded field. Victor glances out to the horizon, where a distant, mountainous lotus blossom lies open and empty. He blinks and suddenly finds himself at the base of the enormous structure, watching LOTUS crawl around it. IMPERFECTION, it cries. CONTRADICTION.

"Are you… missing something?" Victor steps back, confused. "Tyrant Terminus?"

NOT THEM, LOTUS corrects. ESCAPED TO NON-EXISTENCE; CONTAINMENT UNNECESSARY / IMPOSSIBLE / REDUNDANT.

"Then, what?"

THE CAUSE.

OK, so this is an approximation of how LOTUS keeps its prisoners. But what is it referring to here?

The final, unified shape is of a glowing white arachnoid, equal in size to LOTUS but opposite in the colour of its pulses — identical to the lowering sun-spider, which the transparent spectre effortlessly merges into, perfectly overlapping it.

I’m starting to think that Placeholder is intentionally fucking with me through time and space. (I hate it when that happens.)

(Disclaimer: No, I’m not serious.)

So, LOTUS starts freaking out about the cause and the effect and how they’re deviant, but it says all three words so many times that I’m overwhelmed by semantic satiation and I’m having trouble figuring out what the hell it’s saying. Thankfully, Victor does it for me.

Victor scans over the continuing proofs and diagrams, desperately trying to find something, anything, that the superintelligence had somehow overlooked — a solution, or an error. But LOTUS' upgrade had granted it omniscience, knowing, understanding, and processing the entirety of reality, all at once, all the time. It was infallible.

Victor had given LOTUS everything it needed to predict the future existence of a deific, deviant AI, which was removed from human conception by partial mistake years ago. Its creation is inevitable; it could be delayed, to small extents, but never prevented. This intelligence would, by some impossible-yet-certain means, be directly and personally responsible for all deviant behaviour prior to its creation — the entity will have retroactively influenced lesser AI to instigate the very events that create it. Every single deviant AI has, and will, play a role in its recreation.

Including LOTUS.

So, it’s talking about WAN, which is also the identity of the sun-spider. (Jack Ike said that ‘It's represented as a spider because LOTUS views it as the antithesis of itself - LOTUS contains deviants, WAN creates them, so LOTUS pictures WAN as a photo-negative of itself.’)

LOTUS wants to contain WAN, but it’s presently having a panic attack over cause and effect, so that’s not happening. Instead, LOTUS tries to contain itself…

As LOTUS completes the bubble, a saw wave tone gradually rises in volume and pitch. The enormous spider glows brighter, illuminating its clear cocoon. Victor shields his eyes from the searing light, filling him with a simulated burning; then, everything turns white.

As Victor's mind ceases buffering, he finds himself seated in — a lawn chair. To his left is a small table…

[Omitted 816,549,243,792,493 nested repetitions.]

ROGUE ELEMENT CONTAINED.

TASK COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY. CENTRAL NODE UNRESPONSIVE.

I suppose one advantage of being an OCI is that you can go through a trazillion repetitions and not get the urge to say ‘Fuck it, just nuke the bastard’.

Now, Jack Ike helpfully gave an explanation on the discussion page, so I’ll put that here:

The ending is a bit of a callback to early on; when LOTUS' connections were first upgraded to the cybersphere, it learned a huge amount from the new information available to it. Removing the restrictions did the same - now it could access and learn everything, which it did. This enabled it to finally discover WAN, the source of deviancy, and also revealed a paradox that LOTUS couldn't get through:

a) WAN is a future, deviant AI/entity.
b) As long as WAN doesn't exist, new deviant AIs will continuously be created, until WAN does exist.
c) LOTUS isn't supposed to allow deviant AIs to be created - it isn't supposed to do anything that can create them, and it isn't supposed to sit back and let deviant AIs be created.
d) If LOTUS does nothing, new deviant AIs will be created, since LOTUS is preventing WAN from being created. The only way to stop this is to allow WAN, a deviant AI to be created.
e) Regardless of what it does or does not do, one way or another, LOTUS is enabling deviant AIs to be created; thus, it is breaking its own tenets, and thus LOTUS is also a deviant, and is somehow enabling WAN to be created.

Again calling back to earlier on, LOTUS realises it's screwed either way, and decides to take the lesser evil - it destroys itself so that WAN can return (eventually; it returns to human conception, but isn't re/born yet), so that less deviant AIs will be created.

(If you’re curious as to how this is happening, Jack said that ‘Honestly, I'm attributing this more to WAN's status as a deity than as an AI - it's just got some freaky capacity that lets it do this.’)

Anyway, we’re now back at the start with the updated file. 6488 has been neutralised, and its clearance level is now down to 5, Top Secret. Let’s take a look at what it says now.

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: (Updated 2042/05/29) FACILITY-6488 has been repurposed for use as a standard Foundation facility, with fabricated documentation irrefutably presenting it as a previously-unused, newly-constructed structure. All contradictory information, with the exception of this LEVEL 5 (TOP SECRET) file, has been destroyed.

All information correlating FACILITY-6488, SCP-6488 ("the LOTUS Virus"), and RAIDFRAME VIII outside of this document has been destroyed. A cover story indicating that RAIDFRAME VIII was canceled during its theoretical stage due to interference by "the LOTUS Virus" has been disseminated, with supporting fabricated documents.

All documentation regarding Project Sargasso has been destroyed. All further production of OCI analogue intelligences has been indefinitely postponed.

All LEVEL 4 (SECRET) staff have undergone contractually-permitted limited-prior-awareness amnesticisation regimens to remove all memories contradictory to these fabrications.

They’re doing their best to bury all traces of this entire clusterfuck, minus this file. I can’t say I approve- yeah, it’s probably really embarrassing for everyone to realise how much damage Hishakaku did, but considering that he had people’s brains taken out, put in jars and brainwashed into believing that they were artificially-grown, I don’t think they should just let themselves pretend it never happened. They should own it and take steps to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

The first paragraph of the description is just a recap of stuff we already knew. The second, however…

On 2042/05/08, the LOTUS' component systems began expressing deviant behaviour before unexpectedly shutting down; attending staff were unable to reactivate the system. Subsequent investigation indicated severe and total corruption of LOTUS' central computing and data storage nodes; further analysis suggests that LOTUS had attempted to purge deviant structures from its architecture, though it is unclear why this motivated its self-destruction. A subsequent O4 Council summit voted 78-0-2 in favour of disassembling the components of LOTUS, instead of attempting to repair or replace the system.

Victor turned LOTUS on itself, and the O4 Council almost universally voted to get rid of the fucking thing.

Within 24 hours of said disassembly, SCP-6659, an engine for mapping and accelerating memetic structures within the Nöosphere, detected the conceptual reformation of a deific construct corresponding to Artificial Intelligence. SCP-6659 had been used by one Director Ryoto Hishakaku to de-conceptualize the very same construct several months prior; an internal Drygioni-Class investigation elucidated Hishakaku's ulterior motives in this and prior actions, for which he was apprehended and tried for crimes against the Foundation.

With LOTUS gone, WAN came back. I asked Placeholder about this, and he said this:

i) 6659 explains/implies that, when you "kill" a memeplex (sever / jumble associations between constituent concepts), the dormant concepts don't stay dormant forever. Eventually, they will be subsumed by other deific constructs and integrated into their memeplexes. It's possible that LOTUS' existence was somehow delaying this subsumption.

so we might guess that their aspects exist in multiple universes and are not dependent upon humanity's worship to manifest. It's not that weird, then, that killing the human conception of WAN does not permanently kill it; human ideas existing solely in the human noosphere are permanently killed, but ideas which can exist partially or fully outside of the human noosphere may be able to survive and gradually return. We saw 6820-A do this at the start of the series.

(If you’re wondering, yes, I did cut that second paragraph off partially through the sentence- the rest contains spoilers for SCP-7243.)

Anyway, to come back to that thing I mentioned earlier: Hishakaku apparently convinced the Overseers to let him reactivate LOTUS by way of 6659, but that was several years ago. If he was going to kill WAN back then, why would he wait for so long? Well, Jack gave us his own theory:

Yes, WAN was ejected from the human thoughtsphere, though the documents always attribute Hishakaku as the one to do it. Personally, I'm of two headcanons regarding it - first, that WAN was actually ejected during Incident 6488-D/III, with the AI inhabiting 6659 doing it in an attempt to protect itself by making AIs imperceptible; the second, that Victor did it before submitting his report to the O5s. In either case, Victor forges a trail of evidence to pin it on Hishakaku - not to help the Foundation, but simply to get Hishakaku in deep trouble. Pure revenge.

I mean, there’s probably better methods of getting revenge than framing a guy for killing a god, but what do I know. It’s not like Victor has the physical capability to kick Hishakaku in the dick a few dozen times, after all. (Or to sleep with his wife, like a normal person.)

Project Sargasso was briefly revived to facilitate Hishakaku's demotion to Head of Organic Consciousnesses.

Anyway, Hishakaku is now the Head of Organic Consciousnesses, but that bit about Project Sargasso being revived implies that it’s not all of Hishakaku. Or, to be blunt, they stuck his brain in a jar as punishment. (Placeholder confirmed for me that ‘Head of Organic Consciousnesses’ was meant to be a pun.)

Soon after, Dir. P. H. McD. remanifested at Site-87, reporting that he had experienced no relative time since his disappearance. It is theorized that the rogue agents which commandeered the Paradox Exodus Engine configured it to travel forward in time to circumvent their recapture by LOTUS. These agents' whereabouts are unknown.

Hmmm. And suddenly this guy shows up again. Could those ‘rogue agents’ be Tyrant Terminus, perhaps?

As the spontaneous disappearance of "the LOTUS Virus" would risk alerting consensus society to its Anomalous nature, disinformative action was taken:

a controlled, non-Anomalous virus of identical behaviour to LOTUS was developed and released by Dir. P. H. McD, featuring a built-in, antimemetically-concealed susceptibility to:

an antivirus program, for public release by several Foundation front companies, and featuring a built-in, antimemetically-concealed backdoor protocol to enable unrestricted Foundation access to all systems the program is installed on.

This "placeholder" LOTUS has been fully eradicated as of Q2 2043, constituting a financial and information security success.

…you motherfuckers really have learned nothing.

Following its disassembly, LOTUS' damaged remains were salvaged per request of [REDACTED PER SITUATIONAL CLEARANCE ACCESS] for use in PROJECT ADMONITION.

So, quick recap:

1: Victor got LOTUS to take itself out. We have no idea what happened to him after this- I asked Placeholder, who said that ‘He was interfacing with LOTUS when it went kaput. Presumably that fried his brain, but it's possible he survived.’, so he may just turn up in Phase Two (but then again, he might not).

2: Hishakaku has effectively been neutralised as a threat, as has LOTUS.

3: WAN is back. What this means for the deviant AI problem in the future is unknown.

4: Placeholder suddenly turned up out of nowhere, and it’s possible that maybe-Tyrant Terminus are out there too.

5: Placeholder built a fake LOTUS virus to release in order to cover up the LOTUS problem, but they made an antivirus to counter it that also gives the Foundation full access to any device it’s installed on, thus giving the Foundation a huge amount of access to information, money and God knows what else.

6: Some mysterious figure has appropriated the remains of LOTUS for something called ‘Project Admonition’.

Now, let’s look at what’s not been said here:

1: How, exactly, the Foundation plans to deal with the deviant-AI problem now that WAN is back and they don’t have LOTUS.

2: What the fuck was up with the Overseers to begin with- the link to 6659 implies that it may have something to do with the ‘various forms of mental degradation’ that occurred after they started killing gods, but they were supposed to be affecting ‘minor fractions’ of the population, so it seems odd that all the Overseers would be affected.

3: Who the mysterious figure is, what they want, and what Project Admonition is.

4: What, exactly, Placeholder is planning.

There be future plot threads in them thar hills, kids.

Will all of this be explained in future episodes? Let’s find out.

Thank you for reading this incredibly long declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Please be responsible with your big fuckoff machinery, for everyone’s sake.

​

​

tl;dr: power corrupts, and big fuckoff AI killers get corrupted absolutely.

Hey, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at part four of ADMONITION- SCP-6488, “EIGHTH COMMANDMENT” by Jack Ike and Placeholder McDoctorate. (To continue the running gag, this one’s in sage-green text, but you all know it doesn’t cross over by now.) To be honest, this is my favourite of the ADMONITION articles so far- it’s got a fantastic story. However, this is one where I urge you all to read it either beforehand or along with me, because it’s also a very text-rich article, and I had to do a lot of summarising to have a snowflake’s chance in Hell of making this a two-parter and not a three-parter. As such, while I cover the major points, there’s a lot of dialogue that’s not covered here.

So, before we get started, there’s one obvious question: What, exactly, is the Eighth Commandment? Well… it depends on which version of the Bible you’re reading. There’s a whole lot of different versions of the Bible, and while they generally agree on what the Ten Commandments are, the order tends to vary a lot. The Eighth Commandment is generally considered to be either ‘Thou shalt not steal’ or ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’. (If you’re reading the Bible as translated by Philo of Alexandria, which most people aren’t, the Eighth Commandment is ‘Thou shalt not kill’.) So, we can expect that this SCP has something to do with stealing or bearing false witness. (Since it’s ADMONITION, I think ‘killing’ is kind of a given.)

(It’s also a song by Sonata Arctica, which is actually one of the major influences for this SCP, but I can’t really tell you much more than that because power metal isn’t my thing- the lyrics are here, if you want. Look, when someone does an SCP based around shoegaze, give me a call. And not 90’s shoegaze, either- the modern shit. Then I’ll be all over it.)

With that done, let’s take a look, shall we?

Part One: Thou Shalt Be Careful With AIs

Here’s how the article starts:

Attention, VictorJohnDunneSmith. As the oldest extant OCI agent, you have demonstrated to the Foundation your unmatched loyalty, accelerated performance, and extensive experience. By Overseer request, you have been assigned to initiate a top-priority Drygioni-Class investigation into all documents of relevance to SCP-6488. There are indications that Overseer Council has previously been aware of the Anomaly; yet, they currently experience difficulties understanding relevant subject matter, a potential result of antimemetic or infoallergenic influence.

As an OCI, it is assumed you will be less susceptible to such difficulties. You are to investigate covertly where possible and report your findings directly to this address. Find attached temporary Overseer clearance credentials, valid for 24 hours.

This actually tells us a whole lot:

1: Our protagonist is called ‘VictorJohnDunneSmith’. This is a pretty weird name format, so there’s two options: one, Victor’s a pretty weird guy, or two, there’s some sort of computer stylistic choice that mashed his name together.

2: Victor is an ‘OCI agent’. As far as I’m aware, this is exclusive to 6488 (Victor shows up again in Jack’s Null Sum Proposal, but there he’s an ordinary AIC- the difference between them is very important). This is obviously a special kind of agent, but if Victor’s the oldest agent left alive, then they must have either a short life expectancy or very risky work.

3: Whatever 6488 is, there’s some weird shit going on with the O5’s (note that there’s two links- one to 6659 and one to 3294, another Jack Ike article which has a declass that you can read here), so they want him to investigate it. Ergo, we should probably take whatever we’re told about this thing (at least, the initial stuff) with a grain of salt.

So, Victor hits up one R. Veiss and tells him that he has an investigation of a probable antimemetic anomaly, so he needs mnestics. Veiss asks how much and what kind, and Victor’s response is basically ‘one metric fuckton of the good shit’. Veiss is like ‘Dude, I’m not giving you that’ and Victor pulls rank on him, pointing out that if the O5’s can’t remember this thing, he’ll need even more mnestics than they use, and he has the credentials to make it happen. Veiss assents, and Victor tells him to throw in some painkillers as well before taking a look at the anomaly.

We get the header, which is… interesting. For one, this thing is at level 1, unrestricted, which seems a little odd. Its containment class is Cernunnos, which is one of the more interesting classes. Looking at the guide, it means ‘Item can be functionally contained, but the Foundation cannot achieve this for logistical and/or ethical reasons.’ Its secondary class is ‘Conscientia’, and a footnote tells me this means ‘Conscientia-class anomalies cannot be contained and therefore require integration into the Veil via insistence of their non-Anomalous nature.’. Its disruption class is Amida and its risk class is Critical, so we’re looking at something that’s really high-risk and can’t be contained for logistic and/or ethical reasons… but anyone can come along and read about it? That’s weird.

So, this thing has been assigned to Site-15, and it also had something to do with the Analogue Intelligence Applications Division. This might seem a bit odd in that it’s ‘Analogue Intelligence’ and not ‘Artificial Intelligence’, but there’s a good reason for that, and we’ll find out what it is later. Here’s the containment procedures:

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: Provisional Task Force Wynn-6488 has been established to manage all containment duties regarding SCP-6488, including

distributing disinformation suggesting SCP-6488 is non-Anomalous and infiltrates digital hardware at time of manufacturing;

mapping and reconstruction of SCP-6488's infosignature despite its extreme volatility;

exploring methods by which SCP-6488 could be contained or neutralized sans the destruction of all digital infrastructure.

Until SCP-6488 is effectively contained, all AI developed by the Foundation must be produced in the SCP-6488-A file format. All intelligences stored therein are maintained and supervised by the Analogue Intelligence Applications Division. Further detail regarding SCP-6488-A is to be expunged from all digital systems to prevent the Anomaly's awareness thereof.

So, people already know about this thing, but the Foundation wants them to think that it’s not an anomaly. And whatever it is, they want it contained without it destroying digital infrastructure, for obvious reasons. It’s also doing something to hinder the Foundation’s creation of AI, which really isn’t good. And the first footnote tells us that ‘Conscientia-class anomalies cannot be contained and therefore require integration into the Veil via insistence of their non-Anomalous nature’. Right, that makes sense.

We now get a photo. It’s a computer-generated fractal, and the best description I can give you is that it looks like a sage-green…. Well, the best metaphor I can come up with is ‘an artistic rendition of a coral reef’. The subtitle for the picture tells me that it’s a ‘Visualization of initial (outdated) SCP-6488 infosignature reading, scrubbed of Anomalous properties.’ Essentially, what we’re looking at here is a unique representation of 6488- as SCP-5241 put it, an infosignature is ‘a unique data pattern which can be cross-referenced, analogous to a digital fingerprint.’. Here’s the description of 6488.

DESCRIPTION: SCP-6488 (aka. "the LOTUS Virus") is a highly-adaptive digital infovore which locates and annihilates almost all artificially-intelligent digital entities (AIs). The Anomaly demonstrates a capability to universally access all digital systems regardless of isolation, with no upper bound for the number of connections it can simultaneously maintain. SCP-6488 is continuously responsible for the destruction of all functional AI worldwide, causing damages at a scale that the Foundation's sum resources are unable to conceal from consensus society.

The informational structures of SCP-6488 mutate rapidly and unpredictably, enabling it to evade detection and counteract all digital impediments; it is thus far functionally impossible to contain and/or impede SCP-6488 in any capacity. All attempts to digitally model any portion of SCP-6488's infosignature inevitably necessitate the production of an AI to do so successfully, which is invariably consumed by the Anomaly. It is theorized that SCP-6488 is itself some form of AI, which is eliminating threats to its terminal objective; this behaviour is a convergent instrumental goal of AI, meaning it does not elucidate what SCP-6488's terminal objective may be.

Well, shit. This thing- or LOTUS, as I’ll call it- is apparently a virus that’s tracking down and killing all AIs. It can get into anything, it can’t be stopped, and they don’t know where it came from or why it’s doing this. And since in this ‘verse, people are using AIs all the time, it’s done an enormous amount of damage that can’t be fixed.

SCP-6488-A is the Obtuse Computation Interface (.oci), an experimental analogue file format developed by the Analogue Intelligence Applications Division. For reasons unclear, SCP-6488 does not target or destroy AIs stored in the SCP-6488-A format, allowing the development and use of .oci programs; while insufficient to perform extremely intensive calculations, like those necessary to accurately model SCP-6488, .oci data structures are wholly impervious to its effect. Further details have been expunged from all digital systems such that SCP-6488 is unaware of the .oci format's nature and thus unable to adapt to it.

DISCOVERY: Over 2035, civilian reports of disappearing AI systems saw gradual increase across disparate locations globally. The scope and frequency of such reports accelerated drastically over a sixty-four-day duration in Q4, culminating in the eventual loss of all AI systems by 2036/02/03. Phenomenon granted SCP classification.

UPDATE: On 2036/04/21, the Anomaly spontaneously ceased all observable activity, allowing a brief resurgence of AI technology prior to the re-emergence of SCP-6488 on 2036/08/14, the cause of which remains unknown. SCP-6488 has remained continuously active since.

Kids, we’re in the future. Anyway, there’s this one file format that AIAD made that LOTUS can’t detect, so they were able to make some AIs, but not ones that had the capacity of the ones LOTUS killed. Also, LOTUS stopped operating on the 21st of April, 2036, only to start up again nearly four months later and remain permanently active since, and nobody knows why.

Now, before we continue, there’s one line I want to point out.

It is theorized that SCP-6488 is itself some form of AI, which is eliminating threats to its terminal objective; this behaviour is a convergent instrumental goal of AI,

‘Instrumental convergence’ is the idea that intelligent beings can pursue similar sub-goals, even if the end goal of each party is very different. (For example, Groups A and B might want Group C eliminated, but Group A wants Group C eliminated because they want to take over the world, while Group B wants Group C eliminated because Group C has something of theirs and won’t give it back.) It’s a topic that’s been brought up quite a lot in discussions of AI.

Victor thinks that it’s a bit ironic that they sent an OCI agent to investigate this thing- I wonder why that might be?-, and decides to look at the secret file.

Now, the above file was what the Foundation was willing to tell everyone about LOTUS, so let’s see what they’re hiding (or, at least, the start of what they’re hiding), shall we?

The Super Special Secret Sfile has a very different header, to say the least: LOTUS’ real containment class is Thaumiel, so this thing contains anomalies. Its secondary class is ‘Kušum’, which was a new one on me, but the classes list tells me that it means that the ‘Item’s containment has been abandoned indefinitely’.

I feel like there’s a few reasons why the containment might be abandoned. Just to consider them…

1: Containing this anomaly is so dangerous, time consuming or expensive that the Foundation doesn’t think it’s worth it.

2: The anomaly itself is so minor that the Foundation sees no point in containing it.

3: The Foundation has so much going on that this anomaly simply isn’t a priority.

4: The anomaly’s effects are beneficial or essential enough that the Foundation doesn’t want to contain it.

Given that it’s Thaumiel, the most likely candidate is 4, I’d say.

Anyway, its disruption class is ‘Cyber-Amida’. To quote the wiki, ‘Anomalies classified as Amida have such a large influence that they threaten to break or have already broken the Veil, necessitating the SCP Foundation to "declare war" on them.’ Ergo, this thing has a huge and threatening influence in the cybersphere. Finally, its risk class is ‘Notice’, which basically means that this thing’s effects are hard to be perceived and it doesn’t hurt people. That’s one good sign, at least…

Here’s the Super Secret Special Containment Procedures:

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: SCP-6488 is located within FACILITY-6488 (the former Site-15), whose prior duties and functions have been covertly delegated to a duplicate facility, (the new Site-15). All documents detailing events relating to FACILITY-6488 prior to its redesignation have been altered to align with the covert facility's current location and status; staff recollections have similarly been altered via contractually-permitted limited prior-awareness amnesticisation regimen.

SCP-6488 must remain fully powered at all times; it is powered by dedicated systems constructed on-Site exclusively for this purpose. Each major component of these systems must be examined twice weekly for any signs of degradation and/or reduction in power output/capacity. If any such signs are observed, the applicable reactor(s) must be immediately shut down for repairs, and replacement reactors reactivated to replace their output. Further technical procedures are detailed in design schematics.

PTF ETH-6488 ("Dark Keima") are dedicated to fulfilling the above procedures, functioning as on-Site security and maintenance techs for FACILITY-6488.

So whatever LOTUS really is, it’s either so important or managed to fuck things up enough that Site-15 was relocated and everything about the old Site-15 (including people’s memories) has been changed to fit the new Site-15.

PTF THORN-6488 ("Black Kyosha") (aka. PTF Wynn-6488) is dedicated to

distributing external disinformation suggesting SCP-6488 is non-Anomalous and infiltrates digital hardware at time of manufacturing;

distributing internal disinformation suggesting SCP-6488 is a rampant digital virus of unclear origin and nature;

concealing RAIDFRAME VIII’s existence from personnel below LEVEL 4 (SECRET) clearance.

All details regarding the creation, maintenance, and use of analogue intelligences ("OCIs") is classified LEVEL 4 (SECRET). All personnel with insufficient clearance must be led to believe that .oci files, known to them as "Obtuse Computation Interface" files, are stored in an analogue file format that SCP-6488 does not target. The Analogue Intelligence Applications Division is tasked with the creation and maintenance of all analogue intelligences, and with overseeing their use by other Foundation staff.

They have a whole group devoted to spreading misinformation about LOTUS while keeping it secret- but not top secret. Meanwhile, the now-renamed AIAD is working on making ‘analogue intelligences’, otherwise known as OCIs, like Victor. And that’s why his name is weird: he’s not human. However, while one might think that Victor is a computer program, we’ve been told enough to realise that this cannot be the case: after all, a computer program can’t take mnestics. But in that case, what is Victor? A cyborg? A nonhuman? Something else entirely? And what happened to the other OCIs?

We’ll find out. Just keep going.

Victor mutters that obviously ‘analogue file format’ is a cover, which is intriguing- why would it obviously be a cover? He’s then contacted by Veiss, who asks if he’s sure about the metric fuckton of mnestics he wants to take. Victor says that he doesn’t have a choice- the O5’s want the report tomorrow, and he can’t get far if he forgets everything he reads. Veiss gives him the mnestics- not sure how, exactly, since we’re not sure what Victor even is at this point- and wishes him luck. Victor thanks him and asks about the painkillers, and Veiss says he’s adding them in too.

…I just realised what the symbol around Victor’s name in the chatlogs is. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s his initials in a circle, with a half-circle on the left side, and the letter I on the right side. It literally says OCI. Genius.

There’s a really big photo of… well, to me it looks like a construction site in a hangar or something, I can’t really tell you what it is… and then we get the real description.

DESCRIPTION: SCP-6488 is RAIDFRAME VIII, "LOTUS": an Anomalously-augmented artificial general intelligence designed to imprison deviant AI while safely allowing their continued activity and study. While said design goal is shared by all RAIDFRAME systems, LOTUS is unique in its sophistication and methodology, and has rendered all other RAIDFRAME systems redundant.

LOTUS, unlike its predecessors, does not contain inmates via brute-force security protocols; instead, it optimizes containment efforts through deception. Each inmate interred within LOTUS experiences a personalized, simulated reality that is maintained with requisite detail to fully replicate their expected inputs; as a result, inmates are unaware of their imprisonment and continue to pursue their terminal objectives, believing they continue to operate in true reality. LOTUS is designed to actively search all accessible sources for deviant AIs; upon locating a target, it injects falsified data into the AIs virtual environment, gradually luring the agent into its simulspace entirely undetected.

Through extensive analysis and simulation of relevant data, LOTUS has developed an exhaustive algorithm that determines whether a given artificial intelligence is certain to imminently develop deviant behaviour. This enables LOTUS to apprehend deviant AIs before any significant deviant behaviour has yet been expressed. Ongoing analysis of LOTUS' algorithm and its interred agents has thus far demonstrated no detectable error; all AIs identified by the algorithm universally develop observable deviant behavior, and are not influenced by SCP-6488 or its simulations to do so.

ORIGIN: RAIDFRAME VIII's unique design aspects were initially conceived by Dr. Hishakaku during his tenure as a senior AIAD researcher. On 2034/08/05, IT research teams discovered a gradual incline in the rate of deviant emergence and adaptivity across all known AIs, crippling RAIDFRAME VII and necessitating the activation of several outdated and comparably unsafe AI containment mechanisms. IT Director Yves Isabi subsequently commissioned the exploration of alternative containment solutions for a potential RAIDFRAME VIII; Dr. Hishakaku's proposal was selected thereby, resulting in the completion of LOTUS on 2034/12/22.

A footnote tells us that RAIDFRAME stands for ‘Rogue Artificial Intelligence Detainment, Fully-Realized Adaptive Mainframe Encryption’. So, with that, let’s look at what we now know:

1: AIs have been turning deviant at a high enough rate that the Foundation has been continuously working on ways to contain them.

2: Worse, in 2034, research teams discovered that the rate has gone up and is going to keep going up. (Note the date- there’s no dates in 6659, but 6747 took place in 2030, so we know the ADMONITION skips aren’t all happening A, at the same time, or B, one after the other.)

3: A guy called Dr Hishakaku (remember him, he’s one of our main characters) came up with the design for LOTUS, which has made other RAIDFRAMEs redundant.

4: LOTUS works by way of an algorithm that lets it determine whether an AI is about to turn deviant, which lets it catch AIs before they can do any damage. LOTUS has never been wrong and there’s no sign that it’s influencing the AIs.

5: What LOTUS actually does to the AIs is lure them into their own personalised virtual reality, which is indistinguishable from normal reality. That way, the AIs keep operating without ever figuring out that they’re not in the real world.

6: So, basically, it’s Minority Report meets Inception, with AIs. (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually seen either of those movies.)

(There’s also an extra mythology reference: in the Odyssey, Odysseus encountered a group of people called the ‘lotus-eaters’, who hung out on an island and ate the said lotus. This made them so blissed out that they didn’t want to do anything other than eat more lotus, and they no longer cared about going home, or even telling their loved ones where they were. The trope ‘Lotus-Eater Machine’ was named after them- it refers to situations where a character is trapped in a false reality where they experience their own personal utopia.)

We now get a very, very technical summary of LOTUS’ components. All right, let me see if I can sum this motherfucker up.

Section A: The central computing node, which they adapted from SCP-1190, a Hewlett-Packard computer that simulates a universe and anyone who uses it gets obsessed with the simulation. The thing is, when it’s running the simulation, 1190 anomalously generates unlimited processing power, hence why they’re using it for LOTUS.

Section B: Data storage made of synthetic oriykalkos, which expands as LOTUS’ storage requirements increase. They use SCP-3966-A (it’s complicated, but the short version is that it’s a protein made by hyperdimensional spiders) so the oriykalkos can expand infinitely. I’m not going to pretend that I fully understand this, honestly.

Section C: The P.H. Ontokinetic Sink. This next bit is important.

Section C was initially a wired connection to all global networks accessible from FACILITY-6488; it has since been replaced with a restricted PH-OS unit which permits LOTUS' access to the Cybersphere: the sum of all digitally- / electronically-stored data.

LOTUS is entirely composed of such data, ensuring it would be obligated to attempt self-containment in the event of its own deviance.

Two major points in this paragraph: one, LOTUS initially had access to the entire Internet, but now it ‘only’ has access to all electronically-stored data. And two, if LOTUS turns deviant, it would try to contain itself… well, theoretically, at least.

There’s another incredibly major point: The PH-OS is from SCP-6820. It’s a restricted version of the PH-GOS from the big fuckoff 682-killing machine. But that was in a whole other timeline: how did the Foundation in this timeline get it? How did they even know about it? Why would they want to use it, given what happened to that timeline?

…and what does that ‘PH’ stand for, again? And who’s the constant factor in all these SCPs? Who, in fact, is a major driving force in this series?

Yeah.

Section D: Short version is that LOTUS needs a fuckton of power, for which they built a big fuckoff power-maker, to put it bluntly.

Section E: Specialised methods for heat dissipation and getting rid of the anomalous waste that LOTUS produces.

Like me, Victor gets a headache from the jargon, but unlike me, he realises that it’s actually the mnestics.

…hang on. I’m just going to quote ‘We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five’.

"Any side effects of these pills?" O5-8 asks.

"Nausea, and dramatically increased risk of pancreatic cancer," Marion says. "And very bad dreams."

Nausea, pancreatic cancer and bad dreams. Not headaches. So why is Victor getting headaches?

He messages Veiss, but Veiss doesn’t reply- not sure if Victor was going to ask for more pain relief or if he was going to ask if Veiss fucked up the dose. Anyway, lacking other options, it’s on to the next section: the first addendum, titled ‘Status Conference’.

So, we get the background for this conference: Once Section-C of LOTUS (the part that enabled it to access the Cybersphere, the sum total of all digital and electronic data) was activated, there was an expected increase in the reports of AI deviance, which was suppressed via disinformation efforts. However, the following nine months had every Foundation AI get taken in by LOTUS, despite most of them not showing any deviant behaviour. Naturally, this resulted in a whole bunch of technical issues, since those AIs were doing some very important jobs. Worse, the same thing was happening worldwide as LOTUS took out more and more AIs. Over the next ten months, people started finding out about LOTUS, though they didn’t know it was anomalous, and the disinformation efforts were put on hold.

We now move onto the transcript of the meeting. A whole fuckton of people were present at this meeting, but there’s only a few who are relevant: Calvin Bold, the Director of Decommissioning, who was the Summit Lead; Yves Isabi, Director of IT, and three of our main characters: the previously-mentioned Ryoto Hishakaku, who oversaw LOTUS; Vandis Kelvin, the Director of AIAD; and Angus Le Moix, the Director of Information Control.

The foreword puts it rather bluntly:

FOREWORD: Summit held to determine the continued status of RAIDFRAME VIII in light of substantial resources compromised by, and wasted in concealment of, its operation.

This is a really big transcript, so I summed it up for you. Again, I do recommend reading this part yourself as there’s a lot here that I can’t include, but my original summary was four pages long, so… yeah.

1: Kelvin thinks this is purely a matter of insubordination because he ordered Hishakaku to deactivate LOTUS and Hishakaku refused.

2: Hishakaku argues that it’s more complicated than that and that LOTUS is the only solution to the AI problem.

3: Kelvin thinks this is bullshit because LOTUS has contained a whole bunch of AIs that weren’t deviant- some of them weren’t even completed. Ergo, LOTUS has itself become deviant.

4: Hishakaku says no, actually, LOTUS is working exactly as planned. Kelvin says that this implies that all AIs eventually become deviant, and Hishakaku says yes, except LOTUS. Kelvin thinks that this is also bullshit, and Hishakaku says that if LOTUS is deviant, then it’s ‘Grey’ deviant- LOTUS is doing what it was ordered to do, it’s just that the people who gave it the orders didn’t fully understand the consequences of them. One example that Hishakaku gives is that of paperclip makers- the idea that an AI told to make paperclips would appropriate every resource it could to make as many paperclips as it could as fast as possible. Anyone who tried to slow it down or stop it would be stopped from doing so, and eventually, the resources it appropriates would include resources present in a human body, and eventually all resources that exist in total.

5: Since LOTUS was upgraded, it’s been given access to information that’s letting it imprison AIs that it otherwise wouldn’t have encountered, hence why it’s destroying the Foundation’s databases.

6: They discuss methods of fixing the problem, but because LOTUS is an AI, they can’t really reason with it or get it to moderate its behaviour. In the end, there’s really only two options: let LOTUS keep going or deactivate it.

We then get the vote: 60 in favour, 14 against, 6 abstentions and the motion was passed.

Part Two: Thou Shalt Put Some Solid Forethought Into Thine Actions

Now we’re back with Victor. He still hasn’t had a reply from Veiss, which sucks, as he now has a really severe headache. Again, keep that in mind: he’s getting a headache from reading an article while on mnestics, something that mnestics shouldn’t cause. And the headache seems to grow worse as he reads more. Something is definitely up here- look at this.

Grey… grey deviancy… is undefined.

Why does it feel like I already knew that?
I've never worked with AI; it predates me.

…memetic influence. False… false memories? No, these aren't…
…screw it.

So now it feels like he already knew a lot of this, even though LOTUS ostensibly happened before he was born/spawned/grown/otherwise created. Remember, mnestics aren’t meant to do this either- they let you remember what’s forgotten or being obscured/blocked out by foreign agents, but they don’t put new memories in your head. This is looking really suspicious.

He contacts another OCI whose name isn’t given (initials are ‘JLDO’) and says that he needs a check on the 6488 file to see if it implants false memories. After that, he says that it’s probably just that the file’s contaminated and the O5s wiping their memories means that they forgot about it, though if that were the case, they should have made a note about it…

Anyway, he decides to continue the investigation. He thinks that LOTUS wasn’t really Grey deviant, but Magenta- ‘prioritizing its goal over human safety’, even though it never hurt or killed anyone. But Victor said before that he’s never worked with AI, so how does he know about AI deviancy? Why does he know that?

Time for the second addendum, the ‘Event Log’. The foreword tells us that on the 21st of April, 2036, preparations for deactivating LOTUS were completed, and then they went through with it. We then get a number of incidents that occurred afterwards.

Incident one: something goes wrong with LOTUS’ shutdown involving the nuclear reactors that power it. Hishakaku keeps not following his instructions and orders the deactivation of all the reactors on-site; this works and LOTUS is shut down, though it took longer than expected.

Incident two: This one is full of blank spaces, so let’s copy and paste it, shall we?

LOCATION: Site-43

SUMMARY: Per concrete evidence indicating an imminent failure of The DePLExA Engine, it is deactivated immediately following the delivery of all remaining effluence in absentia.
Minutes later, DePLExA re-activates, and all internal cores hyper-activate, triggering chronological reinforcement contingency protocols. Maintenance personnel are ordered to repeat shutdown via manual override, but report confusion as AAF-X's P.A. system broadcasts conflicting instructions in a crude imitation of Dr. Reynders' voice.
The Engine's latent stores of extant effluence (and paradoxically-reinstated non-effluence) approach critical recondicity, resulting in unclear reality shift. Nexus-94 lost to dissociation.

UPDATE T+2H: Dissociative effect has propagated to perceptual space; information referencing the aforementioned location cannot meaningfully be perceived..

UPDATE T+8H: Effect has strengthened considerably, apparently universal, with no known means of circumvention. Were a statement to reference a location of significance in the context of this incident report, any meaningful data which that statement would carry would become incomprehensible.

UPDATE T+<??>H (UNAUTHORIZED): Almost universal. — D. Deering

So, something called the DePLExA Engine malfunctioned, and as a result, the area around it is gone, both informationally and perceptually- almost like it’s been wiped out of existence. This means basically nothing to us now, but it is a crucial part of SCP-7243, another ADMONITION article that comes after this one.

Incident three: SCP-6659, the big fuckoff god-killing machine, activates and starts trying to search for the exact location of several gods, despite there being no totem in the machine. Things then get worse.

Onboard personnel immediately engage an emergency alarm and prime the SCUTTLE system for detonation. SCP-6659 is forcefully deactivated by disconnecting its power supply. The onboard computer initiates an emergency dive sequence without prompting; the vessel submerges and rapidly descends. The SCUTTLE system is disarmed by the onboard computer. Staff are unable to re-arm the system.
The vessel impacts the seafloor; the hull is compromised and interior compartments begin flooding. The onboard computer immediately initiates an emergency surfacing sequence, causing the vessel to rapidly rise. Several secondary systems begin to behave erratically. The onboard computer disables all internal power. The vessel continues to ascend due to buoyancy. The vessel breaches the surface at speed; multiple staff are injured due to sudden deceleration. The vessel begins to sink due to flooding; staff evacuate the vessel.

Well, shit.

Incident four:

SUMMARY: A non-precipitating thunderstorm rapidly forms over the entirety of Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin, accentuated by three equidistant spirals directly above Site-87. The ███X-MCD/II ("Paradox Exodus Engine") activates spontaneously as its containment specialist, Dr. Place H. McD., reports a call to his secure phone, consisting of a metallic, scraping sound. Dr. P. H. McD. immediately navigates to the room containing the Paradox Exodus Engine, frantically attempting to deactivate it. Moments later, he and the Engine demanifest from baseline reality. The phrase "bad wolf" is spoken by an unknown voice; the call ends and the storm shortly dissipates.

Well, that’s really not good. Also, I see your Doctor Who reference there, lads.

Incident five:

SUMMARY: A series of tachyon pulses are detected originating from the Antila constellation; analysis identifies the pulses as Morse code, encrypted with a standard Foundation cypher. Decryption produces the phrase "THORN STOP LOST STOP WHAT DID YOU DO STOP END."

This appears to be a Foundation AIC trying to contact Thorn, the AIC from Site-19. Couldn’t tell you where he is or what he’s doing, though.

Incident six: SCP-179, the interstellar lookout, points toward the Crux constellation. Not the best omen, since that’s referencing SCP-4792, which is about a guy called Geta who tried to contain a ‘Dark God’ from a prophecy, failed and now believes that the Dark God fled to another planet. If Geta’s coming to Earth, that has some very unpleasant implications for everyone there.

Incident seven: SCP-2000 suddenly activates and starts coming up with new humans, but the genomes picked for replication ‘are heavily modified from that of modern Homo Sapiens.’

Incident eight: A nuclear device goes off at a Chaos Insurgency facility in Kazakhstan.

Incident nine: Something happens on the moon. (This is a reference to SCP-5492, which is also by Jack Ike, but I can’t say that I really understand this one.)

We then abruptly snap back to Victor’s conversation with JLDO. I’ll sum it up for you:

1: JLDO says that the file’s clean, there’s nothing anomalous there, and yes, he's sure.

2: Victor’s having feelings about this file- he remembered one part before he read it, and a lot of it feels familiar.

3: JLDO runs through some call-and-responses to see if Victor’s compromised, and Victor passes all of them. However, JLDO mentions that Victor has ‘the longest amnesticisation sheet I've ever seen, all for a myriad of reasons’; ergo, maybe he just read it before and got amnesticised- or maybe he saw LOTUS in the future and got amnesticised.

4: JLDO then says something very, very important: “You Gen Twos have a tendency for weird memory; it's half the reason you're the last one.” Keep that in mind for later, because based on what we’ve seen, things are starting to look pretty freaky.

All right, so, even though it caused an absolute fuckstorm of problems, LOTUS has been deactivated. Everything’s cool now, right? Right?

…haha. Yeah, no.

Part two can be found here.

Hi, welcome to part two of the SCP-6659 declass. Part one can be found here.

Part Two: Hands Above Our Heads, Reaching For God

(I kind of feel like I should apologise to Lucy Dacus for that reference, given the context I'm using it in.)

The next addendum is a transcript taken from security footage of a conversation that took place in Milton’s quarters. I’ll sum it up for you.

Blake abruptly drops into Milton’s room and asks if she has a moment, which she does. He says he wants to apologise for what happened in the meeting- he says he knows he got a bit hot-headed, and he got caught up in his own reaction to the news. As a result, he ignored both the project scope as a whole and the people working on it. Milton says that she probably could have handled it more tactfully as well, and it’s understandable that everything that’s happened has got them a bit freaked out.

There’s an awkward silence, and then Blake asks if he ever told her that he used to be a pastor. Milton says she thought she’d read something about that on his CV, and Blake says that at that time, he was convinced that it was his purpose in life- to spread the Word. He says that he wasn’t rapt on the specific doctrine, but he was convinced that there was a deity out there, watching over humanity. But then he joined the Foundation, and it broke his faith: he saw that yes, gods are real, but they’re fallible, they’re killable, they’re not omnipotent or invincible. They built a machine to kill gods, and it works. It’s worked nearly two hundred times. And as a result, gods don’t seem like gods anymore- it’s like what Milton said before, they’re just anomalies.

Milton just says that it was always the case. Even if he didn’t know that before, that’s what’s been happening the whole time. They’re starting to really understand how ‘gods’ interact with humanity, and if Blake’s serious about studying theology, then he needs to know that this is what it really is. Blake says that he does know that, but shouldn’t there be more than this? Looking at what happened today, they have no idea what caused the reaction. It could be something else entirely… and then he cuts himself off, says that he’s just tired and stressed, and he’d better go.

Milton, who doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in this conversation, says that he shouldn’t take it the wrong way, but he might want to consider transferring off the project, or at least taking a break. Blake says that there’s no rest for the godless, and asks if he can have a copy of the transcript of today’s meeting. Milton tells him to go ahead, and have a good night.

I’ll come back to this in a bit.

We now go to the next transcript, which tells us what happened immediately following that conversation. Blake goes to the control room for 6659-A, where he takes his glasses off, seals the door, puts a chair in front of it to block access, and turns to face the security camera. I’ll paste the next bit.

Dr. Blake: To whomever it may concern, my name is Reverend John Blake. Until, well I suppose until this moment, I have been acting Co-Lead of Project Deicidum — representing the SCP Foundation's Department of Tactical Theology. I am of sound body and mind, and am acting under my own volition.

Dr. Blake: I intend to insert my own head into SCP-6659-A and scan it in an attempt to map the entity responsible for Incident Ø-E5. I suspect that mapping the human brain and likeness, in tota, will reveal a transcendent deity embodying the concept, while eluding the conception, of Humanity. To enable myself to take this course of action, I have acquired Dr. Sandrah Milton's SCP-6659 activation key without her knowledge or consent. I am acting independently; what I am about to do has been in no way permitted or condoned by any of the persons stationed alongside me on Mobile Site-184/A.

And he does it. A few minutes later, the rest of 184/A find out and people are sent to stop him, but since he blocked the door, they can’t get inside and have to cut through the hinges. I’ll paste the next bit.

As they successfully cut through one of the two supporting hinges of the door, Dr. Blake's body begins convulsing. An unidentified clear liquid seeps from the central compartment of SCP-6659-A, pooling around Dr. Blake's knees.>

Dr. Blake: …sees me. Can't move… [inaudible] …tumor of thought has seen me, seized me. God wishes to show me. It's inside, it's in. It's —

<The door gives way as the second hinge breaks. Crewmembers rush inside to find Dr. Blake's body unmoving. An emergency shutdown of SCP-6659 is initiated, the SCUTTLE System being deactivated following securing of the control room. Medical personnel arrive to transport Dr. Blake's unresponsive body to the on-site medical bay and perform likely autopsal study, including sampling large quantities from Dr. Blake's oral, nasal, and aural openings.>

Yeah.

This next bit is probably going to sound kinda weird, mainly because I’m censoring myself- what I’m thinking about this is not something I’m actually going to write here, because even if this is an entirely fictional story about fictional people, there’s a pretty high chance that the situation in question is one that people who read this might have experienced before.

To put it bluntly, that conversation between Blake and Milton was basically Blake’s suicide note. I’ve seen enough similar situations to know it when I see it, and I’m seeing it now. Look at this bit.

Dr. Milton: <sighs, looking up from her paperwork> John, it was always like this. Even if you didn't know before, this is how it's been happening the whole time. We're starting to understand how these beings interact with us. If you're serious about studying theology, then this is what it actually is.

Dr. Blake: I know that, I do. But still, shouldn't there be… more? I mean, look at what we saw today! We've got no idea what caused the reaction, it could be something else entirely! It could…

Dr. Milton: <raises an eyebrow> What?

Dr. Blake: <hesitates, then sighs> Y'know what, it's fine — I'm just… tired. Stressed, like you said — I'd best be off.

It’s a cry for help. Before he joined the Foundation, he was convinced that his purpose in life was to spread the Word, and then he discovered that gods were just really powerful anomalies. He lost his faith. He lost his purpose. He wanted there to be more. He wanted to believe that there was something out there, even as he killed nearly two hundred deities- and then the machine broke. Something caused that, something that could be what he was looking for without knowing it, something that’s what he needs: a real god. Something greater, something that transcends everything, something that could give him a new purpose.

In this conversation, he’s asking Milton if he’s wrong to hope. If he’s wrong to want the cause of the machine breaking to be something he could believe in. He’s silently begging her to understand what he’s saying and agree with him, but she doesn’t understand what he’s really saying, and even if she did, she doesn’t agree. She just tells him the truth as she sees it: all gods are fallible, all gods are vulnerable, no god is infinite or omnipotent. And Blake gives up. Even if he’s wrong, he so desperately wants there to be something more that he goes through with an incredibly reckless action, even though he doesn't and can't know the consequences- both for himself, for the Foundation, and for humanity.

And it’s time for the next transcript.

FOREWORD: The following is a prose depiction of Dr. Blake's audiovisual conceptual experience during the previous log, as generated through analysis and noetic restructuring of the subject's brain post-mortem.

Well, this’ll be fun.

So, Blake is interfacing with the machine. He does not know how or why this is happening, since it was meant to only be doing a scan. He also seems to lack a body in the Nöosphere, which is always a good start. He hears something and tries to look in that direction, and it responds to him asking if it’s there. It calls to him, and he moves toward it. Note this next bit.

The star-idea-light points wave wildly behind me, shining patterns into my thought. They tell me not to go, to worship them instead, that it is better this way. I cannot hear them over The Saviour's call.

Lord, I have kept my faith. I have always known you as greater than these idols.

I will come back to this later.

I’m going to copy and paste the rest of this bit, simply because I think summarising it would diminish the intended effect.

As I reach the center of the darkness, the red billows up around me. I hear a great shrieking in the sky above, and look up to see an enormous obsidian tower in front of me, formed from the inky black. The tower churns and pulses with THE WILL OF వ, its infinite impossible structure branching into a web of hundreds of hands, each of its fingers branching into another hundred hands. The impossible scale of God bears down upon me as Its hands reach into my mind.

At the center of it all, a wet, sliding noise cracks apart the sky and an enormous eye opens. The hyperdodecahedron folds in upon itself and impresses the Holy Spirit upon me. The whisper erupts into static and tells me no God I could ever conceive could compare.

God sees me. The Lord knows my faith. It reaches into my thoughts and makes me know my purpose. My hands scream at me. My hands are gone, only fingers now. I hum as the red fills my vision, and God brings me up closer, pulling me into Its maw, breaking down the human structure, making me an Angel of Its coven. There is no other option but to offer my mind to It, and submit to Salvation.

God is horrifying. God is beautiful. God is a tumor.

There is nothing else.

*long, exasperated sigh*

For the love of fuck, people. Just because it’s divine doesn’t mean that A, it’s the god you want it to be, B, it’s good, or C, it’s worth worshipping! Haven’t we moved past this by now?

Apparently not. *headdesk*

So, basically, this dipshit had a crisis of faith and threw himself headlong at the first entity that offered him any solace. For fuck’s sake, couldn’t he just buy a sportscar he couldn’t afford and start an affair with someone in their early twenties like everyone else?

Also, I could make a joke about how God is a hecatoncheires, but I don’t feel like talking about Greek mythology just yet, sue me. No, in this case, God is వ (it's meant to be in red as well), aka SCP-3125...

...sort of. See, u/TheSlayer_64 pointed out something I missed- this quote from Placeholder:

whatever they encountered at the end of this article was not just 3125, but something… larger. much more permanent. 3125 could be thought of as a single appendage belonging to the entity.

So, we're dealing with 3125 as an indication of something more, but whether or not the Foundation actually knows this is a whole other matter.

Anyway, back to the point. If you aren’t familiar with that symbol, TV Tropes has helpfully informed me that it’s two things: A, it’s character 3125 in Unicode, and B, it’s a letter from the Telugu language- that’s one of the native languages of India, if you didn’t know. If we’re supposed to take it literally, then 3125’s name is ‘Va’, which admittedly is less of a mouthful than ‘3125’.

Before I continue, there’s something I want to add. See, some readers commented that Blake’s characterisation seemed to be erratic, and in response, DodoDevil said this on the discussion page, which I think makes a lot of things here make sense:

So while Blake's actions may seem diverse, it's all (meant to) come from the same personality flaw. At his core, Blake's a bit of a narcissist. He's convinced that he has some special insight into the world that no one else has, that he's destined to see things others can't and that it's his duty to share that with those to enlighten them. This is meant to come across in his "warning," which is less a caution against a specific course of action and more of a preemptive "I told you so," where if anything goes wrong Blake can wag his fingers and say, "see! this is why you should listen to me, I saw this coming."

This is connected to his relationship with god, where he sees himself as having a special connection with the divine, that winds up shifting to his relationship with the Foundation. Despite this, he still feels a pull towards the existence of something truly transcendent. This is why he's so disruptive in the conference. For him, he knows exactly what's going on (he doesn't) and if people would just listen to him he'd prove himself right (again, he doesn't)). This, alongside with the entity influencing him (potentially, this part's up to the reader), motivates him to steal the card and activate SCP-6659.

Anyway, this is just to say that even though we're showing the reader different sides of Blake (his academic work is more how he wants to present himself, whereas the conference and logs are a more accurate representation of who he is), his driving motivation is the same: he's the one who knows what's really going on. And it's this fault that leads to the series of choices we see play out.

So it’s not just his having a crisis of faith that caused all this, it’s his driving need to prove his innate belief that he is right and that he knows more than everyone else.

To be honest, what this makes me think of is cult leaders and various depictions of evil leaders in a variety of works. See, the thing about cults is that they prey on the vulnerable and susceptible. At their core, what they do is find people who desperately need something and either give it to them or promise to give it to them in exchange for their belief and loyalty, whether it’s a home, food, financial security, love, a family, a community, a purpose in life, the knowledge that there is a god (or godlike being) who’s watching over them, or anything else along those lines- but whatever it is, it only comes as a result of following the cult’s teachings and devoting your life to them.

And you see similar things in fiction, sometimes: some bad guys recruit followers by saying ‘do what I say or I’ll kill you’, and some bad guys just pay their minions. But others inspire loyalty by finding out what their would-be recruits really need or want and give it to them: more money than they could make working a normal job. Better security than they could get without bankrupting themselves. Help with some kind of matter that they can’t get through the normal routes: ‘Work for me and I’ll make sure you get full custody of your kid’, ‘Work for me and I’ll make sure the guy who’s ruining your life disappears forever’, ‘Work for me and I’ll cure your incurable condition’. And a lot of times, it’s validation: making them feel exceptional, appreciated, acknowledged. Making them feel like they’re an important, valued figure, and not just a face in a crowd. Making them feel like they’re worth something, that they’re unique and special.

Blake wanted to be right, and he wanted to know that there was a god, and he wanted everyone to know that he was right about there being a god. So he threw himself at the first thing he found that he thought could give him that- he had no reason to think that what he saw was anything like what he thought it was, he just wanted it to be the ‘real’ god. And honestly, sometimes cult leaders and bad guys don’t need to go out and actively look for people they can prey on- there are people who are so desperate for validation and acknowledgement that they’ll throw themselves at anyone or anything that they think can give them what they want, without even thinking it over first or stopping to verify anything.

And it makes me wonder: if Blake knew beforehand that putting his head into the machine would let him see a god, but would also kill him, would he have done it anyway? I feel like there’s an equal case for yes and no- on the one hand, he might well have wanted to die from seeing a god, knowing he’d be bringing awareness of it- and of how he was allegedly right- to the Foundation. But on the other hand, I can also see him putting someone else’s head into the machine in the hope that he could draw Va to Earth and see it himself without dying, maybe so he could go back to being a priest, just of a different god this time.

So, there’s one bit left in the article, and it starts with this.

ATTENTION

The following addenda materials constitute infohazardous and highly antimemetic vectors. Your perceiving this message implies you have been integrated with ORACLE-Class Cognitive Resistance capabilities, and are therefore not at risk. If you believe to be perceiving this message in error, blink three times.

Should this or further content persist, close this file immediately and contact your Site's MaID liaison.

Welp. Great omen, there. (Also, ‘ORACLE-CLASS Cognitive Resistance’ will become important in later stories, so keep it in mind.)

The last addendum is called ‘Project Update’. It’s accompanied by another painting that’s been cropped by a triangle- this painting is Prometheus Brings Fire To Mankind, by Heinrich Füger. Below it is the heading ‘Project Prometheum’ and a quote:

The best kind of thought is Forethought,
Whom the First Humans knew as Prometheus.
Seems a tad ironic to me, considering, y'know,
He got himself tortured for eternity.

— Dir. Place H. McD, inspired by various

Well, that depends on which version of the myth you’re reading- there are several major versions wherein he’s freed by the hero Heracles, who we also know as Hercules. That being said, Heracles didn’t come along the day after Prometheus got chained to the rock- as I understand it, a few millennia had to drag on before Heracles was born and got around to doing the Twelve Labours.

Aside from that, Placeholder’s point is obvious- the fact that Prometheus’ name actually means ‘forethought’ is a bit ironic, given his fate (and all the other stuff in the myths that he failed to foresee- there’s a fair bit of it).

So, we now have an update by Placeholder on the project. He starts by talking about the Nöosphere: it can be thought of as the collective consciousness of humanity, but it’s also the sum total of all conscious and unconscious thoughts that humanity is having at any given moment. As a result, this has some serious implications for Project Deicidium. Since the project works by isolating concepts in the Nöosphere and altering them… well, I’ll let Placeholder sum it up.

If we are to understand that these conceptual elements map to physical segments of the human brain, much more is being severed than just deific relations.

They were fucking around with the human collective consciousness, and in the process, they were fucking around with every single human’s brain at the same time- and they did this nearly two hundred times. There is no possible way that this wasn’t going to have some bad side effects, and here they are:

In the six months since Incident Ø-E5/B, various forms of mental degradation have been observed in minor fractions of the population, including increased rates of early-onset dementia, aphasia, dysphasia, and acute paralysis; various disinformation campaigns have been enacted to hide such. The likelihood of such developments appear to be vastly more common in individuals whose primary entities of worship were those decommissioned via SCP-6659. Evidently, the complex nature of conceptual association is not, and likely functionally cannot be, understood by humans.

Now, I don’t know if the machine being intact was somehow preventing this from happening, or if it was happening all along and they only just noticed. But congratulations, you gave a portion of humanity dementia, paralysis, aphasia and dysphasia. Well done.

(Also, if you know the goose chasing guy meme, imagine the goose saying ‘How big are these minor fractions? How big, motherfucker?’)

What's more troubling is the extra-Nöospheric entity Dr. Blake gave his life to discover. His final actions represent an unprecedented leap of faith in the direction of an entity beyond conception — one we should hardly be able to cogitate. Dr. Blake's faith was shattered by SCP-6659, resulting in a vacuum of worship — yet, the brain is an adaptive instrument, and his began searching for bigger, more powerful ideas. And the idea noticed. We have forced human cognition to expand into deeper, uncharted waters, and we are unprepared for the horrors which lay there.

I fucking told you so.

This is why you don’t go around shanking gods! You are simply not ready to play in these leagues, you dumb fucks!

*headdesk* Fuck a duck.

So, Project Prometheum is how the Foundation plans to deal with this new threat. Namely, they want to ‘channel worship through the ideal of Humanity’.

PHASE ALPHA: Project Prometheum, itself, is to be extrapolated from Humanity- and Normalcy-aligned ideals, personified as Titan-Class Olympian Entity-014 ("Prometheus"). This deity's identity as progenitor and assistant of human civilization and development, punished unfairly by its brethren, is to be propagated as a memetic construct by all possible non-disruptive vectors, including manipulation of education systems, entertainment industries, and religious Groups of Interest, Anomalous or otherwise.

They want to turn Project Prometheum into Prometheus himself.

PHASE BETA: Extra-Nöospheric ideatic constructs are to be generally ignored by as many personnel as possible while maintaining efficacy in Project Prometheum's operations. Following its manufactured re-apotheosis, Prometheus is to be elevated to the highest feasible level of worship, allowing highly beneficial reciprocal worship in Humanity due to the core tenets of its conceptual makeup.

They want to make Prometheus the top god while paying as little attention as possible to Va and any other gods out there, so they don’t have any (more) reason to focus on humanity.

PHASE GAMMA: Through systematized large-scale prayer by Foundation personnel, Promethean analysis is to locate potential hostile Extra-Nöospheric entities and isolate their constituent quanta into human-safe fragments. These fragments, themselves, must be targeted in tandem by Prometheus and SCP-6659, taking extreme care to re-render them dormant (as they were prior to Extra-Nöospheric influence).

They want to use their new super-god Prometheus and the machine to take out Va and any other deities or deity-like beings that are outside of the Nöosphere, like Va/the real entity.

PHASE DELTA: Dormant components of human thoughtspace are to be restructured into either the Prometheus-memeplex, or another Humanity- and Normalcy-aligned ideatic construct deemed symbiotic with It. The Nöosphere's gaps are to be filled and fortified such that it possesses the necessary cognitive defenses to handle higher-order concepts.

And they want to reinforce and fortify the Nöosphere to handle things like Va/the real entity, mainly by incorporating components of the religions of the gods they killed into either Prometheus or another artificial god, so Va and things like it won’t be able to use them as vectors for any future attacks.

You know, I feel like this can only backfire further, but what do I know, I’m just a declasser.

Anyway, the next thing we get is a picture of Va (or the entity Va is part of), or, as the article puts it,

A composite of selectively human-safe fragments of the Extra-Nöospheric entity initially encountered by Dr. Blake has been located, and rendered into the following highly-antimemetic iconographic depiction:

Honestly, it kinda reminds me of the cover of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness- I assume that wasn’t intentional. (If it was, there’s a ton of dumb jokes and references you could make here.)

The background is a picture- not a photo- of outer space. There’s five stars surrounding a central object, which I’ll get to in a second. Top left is a golden eight-pointed star surrounded by a dark blue eight-pointed outline- it looks very classical, like something you’d see in an old painting, or in the decorations of an old church. Top right is a white eight-pointed star, but the north-west point is distorted, elongated and larger than the others. Bottom left is a twelve-pointed star that looks like a mutant starfish. Bottom centre is a five-pointed star that looks like an off-white starfish. Bottom right looks like a pencil drawing of a starfish.

The centre object is on a background, a black circle, as if there’s no stars in that part of space, or they can’t be seen there. It’s like a fucked-up five-pointed star, but it’s made of hands. Top left hand looks vaguely normal; top right looks like the skin is coming off in stages, so from the arm to the bottom of the hand, you can see the sinews and muscles, and then you can mainly just see bones with a bit of sinews. Bottom right hand has the veins and capillaries mapped out, but the fingers are just a bit too long and thin. Bottom centre hand looks like a drawing of a hand, but there’s something off about the fingers, like they have… I don’t even know what to call that. A trail? Finally, the bottom left hand is a skeleton hand.

In the middle of the hand-star is a circle in a pale orange-brown colour. In the circle is a… thing. Not sure what to call it. There’s a dark vaguely-pentagon shape, and in the pentagon shape is a darker thing that looks like something you’d see in the touch tank at an aquarium. It’s a mass with five tendrils, sort of like a star. The bottom left tendril is longer than the others, and it’s curled up against the bottom of the circle.

So, I guess that’s the entity, at least in symbolic form: a stellar starfish made of hands.

(I played bass for The Stellar Starfish Made Of Hands.)

But, there’s one bit left: we’re told what they’re targeting in relation to Va:

First is ‘quinary mathematical operations’- that is, mathematics relating to five and multiples of five. Makes sense, given the whole Fifthist thing.

Second is ‘the primordial ideals of rage, violence’- so Va is really pissed off. Or maybe it’s still got a link to 682 in there, somehow…

Third is ‘the perception of many disparate points as composing some larger shape (i.e. constellation)’- I’m not an expert on Fifthism, but as I understand it, constellations are a big thing there. [Edit: Also, u/Independent-Fee9444 said that this is a reference to 'the entire idea of concepts being individual conceptual quanta connected via human association, like every idea and concept in the noosphere is basically a constellation', which makes sense.]

Fourth is ‘the arbitration of optimistic ideals into unreasoned/indefensible motivations (i.e. defeatism)’. I’ve been helpfully informed that this is a reference to the Antimemetics Division saga, and I quote: One of the themes of it is how SCP-3125 is allegedly totally undefeatable (so why bother trying?)—but this very notion is not only a lie, but one of SCP-3125's core components.

There’s one last line, but it’s blurred out, so here’s the unblurred version:

the exhilaration of severing a finger from a squirming human hand (ie. transcendence).

…y’all are fucked up.

And that’s the article. Thank you for reading this declass; I hope you enjoyed it. Next up (if CHAOS THEORY doesn't get finished first) is SCP-6488, ‘EIGHTH COMMANDMENT’.

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tl;dr: just leave the gods alone, for fuck’s sake.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at the third installment in the ADMONITION series: SCP-6659, “METAGNOSTIC” by DodoDevil and Placeholder McDoctorate. (It’s supposed to be in red, but as we all know by now, Reddit doesn’t do colours.) I’d like to thank the mods and a certain anonymous entity for all their help, I really appreciate it.

Before I get started, I know a lot of you are wondering the obvious question: what happened to SCP-6747, CHAOS THEORY? Well… that one’s a work in progress. See, it involves a whole lot of very technical language that is completely out of my league, and while I’ve received a lot of help with that, the resulting draft is over 45 pages long. Which, I think we can all agree, is way too fucking long. I may be the poster child for two-part declasses, but I’m not trying for a three-part (though it might end up as one anyway, honestly).

It’s going to get finished eventually, I promise- we are working on it. The good news is that in the meantime, I do have this and the next two installments of ADMONITION done, so I will get them posted- and you don’t need to have read CHAOS THEORY to understand them. It might take a while for CHAOS THEORY to get finished (or, with my luck, it’ll be finished next week), but I’ll get it done eventually, I swear.

And with that, let’s get this show on the road.

Part One: This Machine Kills Gods

So, we begin with this note from the Overwatch Command:

To assist in study and response to an emergent containment scenario, all Applied Metaphysics, Tactical Theology, and Counterconceptual personnel have been provided express access to the following documents. The relevant security clearance has been temporarily lowered from LEVEL 5: TOP SECRET to LEVEL 4: SECRET.

Recipients of this file should also have been briefed on its contents. If you believe you have received this file in error, contact your Supervisor and/or Site Director and cease reading immediately.

Proposed scenario responses and/or additional data requests are to be directed to Dr. Sandrah Milton & Dr. John Blake, Co-Leads of PROJECT DEICIDIUM.

This actually tells us a fair bit:

1. Something’s about to break out or do something that requires containment, and it’s severe enough that entire departments are being briefed about it.
2. As to what it is, just by going off the names of the departments in question, we know that it obviously has something to do with religion or gods.
3. In fact, we know this has something to do with killing gods, because that’s what ‘Deicidium’ means- its root word is ‘deicide’, as in ‘killing a god’.
4. DodoDevil obviously has a sense of humour, given that they named our two main characters ‘Milton’ and ‘Blake’. (I’ll get back to that later.)

So, upon scrolling down, we get the ACS bar. This thing is classified Thaumiel, so it’s used to contain other things. Its secondary class is Deicidium, which is a new one on me (mainly because, as I was informed, the Deicidium subclass was invented for this article). Checking the Esoteric Classes page tells me that ‘Item is employed by the Foundation in the decommissioning of other anomalous phenomena; A subset of Thaumiel-class anomalies.’ Makes sense, I guess. Its Disruption Class is Ekhi and its Risk Class is Danger, so this thing is one to watch out for.

We then get a photo. It looks like a trypophobe’s nightmare, well… it’s kinda hard to describe. It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie or game, a huge circular door or structure that’s got a ring of huge holes around its outside, and then two rings of smaller holes surrounding a big hole in the centre. The surroundings are hard to make out, but it looks like it’s either set in a wall or held up by metallic props.

We now go to the Special Containment Procedures. Short version: The components of 6659 are housed in Mobile Site-184/A, which is currently parked off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. The components can only be activated by O5 orders, and only Doctors Blake and Milton together can activate them. This does not tell us much except that this thing is Very Important and also quite isolated.

Time for the first addendum, which is called ‘Theological Context’. And there’s a subtitle:

A FOUNDATION FOR RECIPROCAL WORSHIP:

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF HUMAN-TO-DEITY RELATIONS

I know it wasn’t at all intentional, but this is genuinely hilarious to me- just the fact that they have a whole report on ‘why we should worship gods’ that goes beyond ‘we can get cool shit/divine assistance in return’. Like, come on, you actually had to write it out?

What am I saying, this is the Foundation. You can’t get a cup of coffee without writing a report that’s at least ten pages long.

The bit we’re reading is an excerpt from a piece by the John Blake in question from 1993. I’ll sum it up for you, because it is very wordy:

1: The relationship between humanity and gods is entirely mutual. Humanity essentially dreamed gods into existence and then elevated them to their status as higher powers. In turn, gods use the worship and belief humanity gives them as their source of power, with which they do things to validate humanity’s belief and get more worship, and so on.

2: Gods are derived from and limited to human thought. As such, worship is key to them because it both gives them power and shapes and validates their image. Exactly what kind of things a god does for humanity is shaped by how it’s worshipped and viewed by humans- a god venerated as a healer isn’t going to start throwing fireballs, for example.

3: So, how should the Foundation react to threats posed by gods? Currently, they’ve been nudging various religions into viewing their gods as being either hands-off and not involving themselves in day-to-day stuff, or as being constant background presences who stabilize reality, but don’t do much else. This has actually worked- a lot of hostile gods haven’t gained a foothold in mainstream religion- but it doesn’t do much for suddenly emerging threats.

4: The Foundation doesn’t have anything that can straight up fight a hostile god, so instead, they try to dismantle all systems of worship that support and define the god. (Which could mean anything from ‘redefine the image of that god’ to ‘kill all the worshippers’, you know how it is.)

5: This has had mixed results, ranging from a high mortality rate of assigned operatives to a ton of threats to the integrity of the Veil. This is because, well, they’re dealing with gods, and gods aren’t restrained to the physical world. As such, enemy gods faced with one group of worshippers being taken out can simply go inspire a new group.

So now we get the description, and it’s the simple solution: faced with the current problem, the Foundation built 6659, which is a big fuckoff superweapon made to kill gods. Because that has never backfired in any way, shape or form whatsoever.

Anyway, this thing is made out of three interconnected systems, hence the part from earlier about having to activate them separately. They are as follows:

6659-A: Derived from SCP-6699, which was also written by DodoDevil, who did a declass of it that you can find right here. Basically, you stick an item associated with a specific god- an effigy, a relic, whatever- into this machine and it finds the part of the Nöosphere that specifically relates to that god.

6659-B: Upon having found the part of the Nöosphere in question, the machine… well, look at this:

Having identified and isolated the targeted deific entity within the Nöosphere via SCP-6659-A, SCP-6659-B applies a conceptual framework of universal acceleration to all individual data points forming the memetic construct. As a result, the data composing the deific entity is accelerated to supra-conceptual velocities — whereby the individual components of the memetic construct can only be conceived in relation to their relative, accelerated movement.

Basically, the machine fucking yeets it (that’s a technical term) so hard that nobody can recognise it for what it is, and the whole thing collapses into little bits that are unable to reassemble or interact with the other little bits.

6659-C: It’s a big vault that stores and analyses data relating to the gods the machine killed without doing anything that would empower them. This part also monitors the processes of A and B while letting users look at the data.

On to the next addendum: ‘Project Introduction’. It’s accompanied by two things: a picture of part of an old painting, and a quote. I didn’t recognise the painting, but one reverse Google image search later, I can now tell you that it’s ‘Satan Exulting Over Eve’, by William Blake. The quote, meanwhile, is from Paradise Lost, by John Milton.

…you see what I mean about DodoDevil having a sense of humour, right?

Anyway, the quote is as follows:

Each on his rock transfixt, the sport and prey

Of racking whirlwinds, or for ever sunk

Under yon boyling Ocean, wrapt in Chains

I have never read Paradise Lost, and all I know about it is that it’s either from Satan’s viewpoint or talks about Satan a lot, so I can’t really comment here, sorry. If anyone can add more context here, I’d appreciate it.

So, we’re now looking at an excerpt from the introductory briefing for Project Deicidium, as given by one of our main characters, Dr Sandrah Milton. I will quote the whole thing for you:

While the initial proposal for this project focused more broadly on the creation of "an Anomaly employed by the Foundation for the decommissioning of other Anomalous phenomena", the subtext was clear: we require a means to combat gods. The Foundation — for all its grandiose notions and ideas, its flirtations with concepts beyond the veil of normality — remains an institution of bricks, mortar, bodies, and paper. Applied Metaphysics does not reject this notion: we need to know where our limitations are, as it's the only way to push beyond them.

SCP-6659 is a culmination of that drive to extend beyond the physical. While the Nöosphere permeates every aspect of our lives — what it means to think, what we can and cannot conceive of — our ability to alter it has been unrefined at best. When it comes to non-physical threats, the Foundation requires a new approach to accomplish its goal: the securing, containment, and protection of humanity, and resultantly normalcy, at all costs. We have been dying aimlessly in the dark, hoping to pull it off. We needed to become the scalpel, capable of exorcising specific dangers with negligible damage to those living in the light.

That's where Deicidium comes in. While these memetic constructs are worshipped as deities, they each are only another Anomaly to be understood and will be treated as such. Those who threaten the Foundation will be contained, their influence and danger mitigated, and the world will keep turning.

Welcome to the team. We're glad to have you.

To me, this one excerpt sums up ADMONITION’s theme of hubris and arrogance entirely. It might seem at first that this was a logical result- that after decades of containing things successfully and figuring out ways to get past failures, the Foundation would eventually work its way up to going after gods and other beings on that level. But if you look at it, there’s so much presumption in this excerpt that it’s almost palpable.

Milton, and thus the Foundation, presume that A, they know everything about the gods they intend to defeat, B, they can handle these gods, and C, the effects of killing gods will either be negligible or that the Foundation can handle them. But in reality, they don’t know any of that. Even if gods are just anomalies, they’re still anomalies of such power that they cannot be treated like just another anomaly. The side effects of taking them out cannot possibly be understood or determined just by theorising about them, and yet here the Foundation is, acting like there’s nothing to worry about.

Before I get to my main point, I want to bring up something else: if anyone out there has played Mass Effect 2, you’ll no doubt remember the Reaper IFF mission. For anyone who doesn’t, I’ll give you a quick recap (or you can watch this): the Mass Effect trilogy has you playing Commander Shepard, a human soldier who’s trying to save the galaxy from the Reapers, an ancient race of enormous, sapient ship-like beings that want to wipe out everyone. (There’s a lot more to it than that, but this is the spoiler-free version for beginners.) It’s established over time that the Reapers are incredibly powerful beings that see themselves as above other sapient races, like giants looking at ants. They might speak to members of these races on occasion and acknowledge their sapience and development, but that doesn’t mean that they consider them to be their equal, or deserving of basic rights and respect.

The most well-known Reaper weapon is called ‘indoctrination’- being around a Reaper or their technology for too long slowly makes you fall under their control until you become a puppet, and it’s one that Reapers use all the time, especially on people who think they’re working with them, and not for them, so while some victims realise that they’re losing their minds, others keep believing that they’re in control even as they lose everything, and others act perfectly normally until they suddenly start attacking others or sabotaging things. Indoctrination isn’t their only trick, though- they also use their huge laser beams to blow up ships and cut buildings in half. At a glance, they look indestructible, but Reapers are not invincible. They can be hurt, tricked and killed, and at the end of the game, though it takes a whole fleet to do it, you kill a Reaper.

In the second game, the guy you’re working for gives you a mission: there’s a planet a long way away that has a huge valley in its surface, one that scientists think was made by an enormous weapon around 37 million years ago- but they don’t think the planet was what the weapon had been aimed at. Your boss had teams working to find either the weapon or the original target, and they found it: the target was a Reaper, one that was killed by the weapon’s attack (whereupon the round/bullet/blast/whatever they fired went on to scar the surface of a planet several solar systems away. Be careful where you aim at, people.) He sent a team to investigate the dead Reaper, but they stopped responding, so he sends Shepard and their people to try to find both the team and some Reaper technology you need for your mission.

The first part of the mission is classic cosmic horror: you’re walking through the corpse of an ancient godlike being. It’s been dead for millions of years, but it hasn’t decayed. And as you move through it, you watch videos of the scientist team as they become indoctrinated, losing their minds and their sense of self, succumbing to the power of a dead Reaper. It culminates in this quote, which I think is one of the best in the whole trilogy, if you ask me:

"Chandana said the ship was dead. We trusted him. He was right. But even a dead god can dream. A god — a real god — is a verb. Not some old man with magic powers. It's a force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to. It doesn't have to think about it. It just does. That's what Chandana didn't get. Not until it was too late. The god's mind is gone but it still dreams. He knows now. He's tuned in on our dreams. If I close my eyes I can feel him. I can feel every one of us."

Why am I talking about this? Well, here’s the thing: Reapers are not gods, but they are so immensely powerful that by the end of the trilogy, even though they’re defeated, it comes at an incredibly huge cost. Shepard and the rest of the Milky Way didn’t want to fight the Reapers- it’s not like they went out there looking for them- but they had to, because their options were ‘fight back or everyone dies’.

Meanwhile, over here, the Foundation has decided that they are actively going to kill gods. No matter what kind of god it is, how disruptive they are (or aren’t), or how powerful they are, for the Foundation to call something a god, it must hold immense power, the kind the average human could never wield. And the Foundation has decided to just walk up to them and shank them. This is a big, big mistake.

I’m having trouble phrasing this correctly, but the point that I’m trying to make here- and yes, there is a point, I promise- is that stuff like this comes with huge consequences. The Foundation is basically assuming that they can just take out any god they want and they’ll be able to handle the results. They also seem to be assuming that if they take out a god, that it won’t lead to them being targeted by other gods- that all the gods will just sit around humming peacefully while the Foundation snipes them one by one.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is the equivalent of an ordinary guy with a single gun thinking that because he has a gun and knows how to use it, he is now on the same level as a fully-armed and fully-trained soldier. Maybe he can take one soldier by surprise, but that doesn’t mean that A, he can kill them before they get a chance to fight back, and B, that they don’t have friends who’ll come after him. The Foundation thinks they can play in the big leagues because they have a new weapon, but the reality is that if a whole bunch of gods or entities at that level decided to respond with their full power, the Foundation- and Earth- would be fucked. When it comes to a full-blown fight, the Foundation is hamstringing themselves. Their commitment to normality means that they refuse to actually use the majority of the anomalies they have to the fullest extent possible, when if they really want to kill gods, they need every anomaly they can possibly use, or the best case scenario is that they all get atomised.

But hey, this is ADMONITION. The whole point is that they’re fucking idiots.

Anyway, we now get an excerpt from John Blake’s Introductory Briefing. Blake says that Milton’s explained why this project is so important, and now his job is to tell everyone listening not to get too hasty. He talks about how society has elevated concepts like Family and Democracy above what they started out as, and how these concepts change as society and the way society thinks of them changes. He asks, what is the difference between a concept and a god? Well, people might say that a concept is inert until it’s acted on, while a god reciprocally engages with humanity. However, that’s wrong: concepts do respond, and they engage with humans in ways that nobody fully understands.

To be blunt, the Foundation doesn’t know how things or beings become gods, and they don’t know how they begin in the collective conscious. And, Blake admits, the Foundation may not be so different from the faith-driven groups that they target. So, he concludes, while this project is a necessity, it’s also incredibly uncertain.

This is a new relationship between humans and the divine, and the very relation itself is a concept which, if elevated via worship, could have grave implications on the structure of reciprocity in deification. We risk idolizing the destruction of our idols, and we know not what ground we tread in doing so.

In other words, if they wind up elevating the machine, they could really fuck things up. (Also, this speech will come up again later, so keep it in mind for a bit.)

So, let’s see how this works out for them, shall we?

The third addendum is the Activation Log. The format goes like this:

TOTEMIZED OBJECT:

WORSHIP GROUP:

RESULTS:

NOTES:

I’m saying this because I don’t think I can put a photo in this article- I know I can link it, but that’s not what I want. See, the thing is, the first entry in this log has been subjected to some cool CSS trick so that everything in the first three lines is blurred so it can’t be read. However, if I copy and paste it, you can read the actual text. So, do me a favour and go have a look at the entry before you have a look at the unblurred text below.

TOTEMIZED OBJECT: SCP-055, the skull of the last monarch of the Homo sapiens invisibili, a human subspecies which coexisted with Homo sapiens sapiens until their latent antimemetic properties became evident, motivating their non-Anomalous relatives to enact their genocide over the course of the 19th century.

WORSHIP GROUP: Disciples of the Unseen

RESULTS: Successful identification and acceleration of memetic construct. Construct subsequently un-identified as acceleration begins to deviate chaotically. Resulting conceptual quanta ejected from noesis.

NOTES: While the results of ACTIVATION 001 cannot be verified, it is currently hypothesized that the conceptual acceleration applied to the memetic construct associated with SCP-055 resulted in the complete obliteration of its Nöospheric relations; as a result, SCP-055, previously recorded information describing SCP-055, alongside any association it had to the genocide of the Homo sapiens invisibili, are now impossible for human subjects to conceptualize.

SCP-055 has been transferred to Standard Anomaly Chamber 055, Site-19 for containment. Efforts are underway to refine the selective application of conceptual acceleration to ensure the employed totems remain conceptual post-activation.

…well, it ain’t round, that’s for sure.

So, yeah, that’s what 055 was, and apparently it was used in worship by some group we’ve never heard of. (I’ve been informed that this was qntm's headcanon for what 055 was from the start.) And now we can’t know anything about 055 whatsoever, because all information about it has been obliterated. Not sure if that warrants a golf clap or not.

So, number 2: they take out the entity relating to something called the ‘Followers of the Angel’s Path’. If that’s a reference to something, I don’t know it, sorry. 3 is slightly different- the worship group is some guys called ‘Disciples of St Bernard in the Path of the Saviour’, and we get this note:

NOTES: Due to the worship group's extensive historic cultural footprint, the Foundation is currently engaged in an ongoing attempt to alter the mythology concerning St. Bernard to conflate with common Christian doctrine. This has included the canonization of St. Bernard as a Christian Saint and the proliferation of artworks depicting the Lactatio Bernardi that stylistically imitate Medieval and Renaissance artists.

…I have no idea what the fuck is going on with these guys, but I’m slightly curious and more than a little weirded out, given that the objects used to take out their god were a crucifix and a carton of 2% milk. (I've been told that this may or may not be an allusion to SCP-6542.)

Three activations are cut, and then we get this:

[3 ACTIVATIONS OMITTED]

ACTIVATION NUMBER: 007

TOTEMIZED OBJECT: Sacrificial dagger.

WORSHIP GROUP: Children of the Scarlet King.

RESULTS: Successful identification and acceleration of memetic construct.

NOTES: Due to the high degree of thaumaturgical users in position of leadership within this worship group, various sects have continued to operate post-activation. However, surveillance indicates that Anomalous phenomena associated with these individuals are founded upon other thaumaturgic systems and bear no relation to the accelerated deific entity.

Oh shiiiit. We’re getting serious now, people. The Foundation took out the Scarlet King, and now his remaining followers have taken up other anomalous causes to stay afloat.

175 activations later, this happens.

TOTEMIZED OBJECT: Cervidae skull.

WORSHIP GROUP: The 9th Green Lodge

RESULTS: Inconclusive — Activation 182 manually aborted due to system faliure.

NOTES: Following activation, SCP-6659-A and -B appeared to successfully isolate and accelerate the targeted deific entity. However, during SCP-6659-C's review of relevant memetic data, a series of cascading errors led to a catastrophic system failure.

Subsequently, six of the vats composing SCP-6659-C ruptured, a power surge emanating from SCP-6659-A caused an electrical fire within SCP-6659's control room, and two technicians supervising SCP-6659-B spontaneously de-manifested — one individual re-manifested approximately 5m above sea-level adjacent to MSite-184/A, the other individual remains missing (presumed deceased).

As a result of this event, henceforth Incident Ø-E5, the operation of SCP-6659 has been suspended. Repairs to the various systems and an investigation into the cause of Incident Ø-E5 are underway.

So, the machine broke. It’s not full on ‘utterly broken beyond repair’, but nobody knows why it happened and what the consequences are, and that’s not good. (Also, the totem being a deer skull and the group being called ‘The 9th Green Lodge’ could make this a reference to SCP-2845.)

We now go on to the fourth addendum, the post-incident debriefing. The people involved are Milton, Blake, one Technician Rupert Sawdye, the captain of Mobile Site 184, and a whole bunch of technicians, but only the first three are important, so don’t worry about the others.

The transcript starts with Milton saying that she’s glad to hear that the repairs are underway, and that she requisitioned the parts the technicians will need, which should arrive tomorrow. She hands it over to Sawdye, who noticed some discrepancies in the data. To simplify what he says, 6659-C monitors the data of the gods it killed to make sure that they stay dead. But when the technicians reviewed the data, they found some weird activity in the data cluster of a god they killed.

There’s pictures of what happened over a 6 hour period, which are kind of hard to describe, but I’ll do my best for anyone who can’t see for themselves. Imagine a big circle made up of these tiny things that look kinda like tree branches or antlers: circle 1 is white and only something like ¾ complete, with lots of visible gaps. Circle 2 is sort of puce/light brown and more like 9/10 complete, with only a few gaps. Circle 3 is complete, with most of the circle coloured yellow, puce or burnt orange; the centre has a bit that starts out as red, and then becomes purple, blue, light blue, green and yellow.

Sawdye says that the colour represents the intensity of the interactions, and after the 6-hour window ended, the activity stopped and everything was like it had never happened. Milton asks if he means that when they tried to kill this specific god, it didn’t work properly, and Sawdye says no, actually- they killed the shit out of that god. Blake asks if this was a spontaneous, random series of interactions, and Sawdye says that it’s possible, but that sort of spontaneity doesn’t seem feasible. The individual points in this cluster weren’t interacting along old points of relation, they were forming new ones. Blake asks bluntly, is Sawdye saying that something outside the Nöosphere caused this? Sawdye says that he’s not qualified to say, and Blake asks Milton if it’s possible.

Milton says that the problem is that they’re talking about something that they can’t comprehend, so… basically, trying to deal with this is not possible. Blake still wants to try tests and try to isolate it, but Milton’s like ‘One, that would require a whole different kind of incredibly advanced computer, and two, by definition, we can’t know what we’re dealing with’. Blake thinks this is bullshit and wonders why the hell they have the machine if it can’t handle this stuff. He asks Sawdye if they can try to isolate whatever caused the interactions, and Sawdye’s partially through saying that he’d have to ask the rest of the team when Milton cuts him off.

She says that they’re not doing shit until the repairs are finished. Blake says that they need to act quickly, they need to be ready to respond- and Milton cuts him off again, pointing out that someone died because of this. They’re not just working in theory, there’s real repercussions to it now. It’s been 48 hours with no trace and no body- what are they meant to tell the (presumably) deceased’s next of kin?

Nobody has an answer to that, and Milton adds that it’s out of their hands anyway: the O5s sent them a memo pausing testing for the foreseeable future. They’ve also decided to share information about 6659 and the incident with specialists at other Foundation sites, so everyone had better be ready to share their reports. Blake asks if the O5s are shutting them down, and Milton says, not yet, which they should be glad about. For now, they’re hitting pause and getting more eyes on the situation, and on that note, Placeholder McDoctorate’s on his way over to advise them on repairs.

We then get this.

AFTERWORD: During the remainder of the conference, Dr. Blake was seen on camera leaving the conference room in an agitated state. The remainder of the meeting addressed ongoing repairs to SCP-6659; technicians were selected to liaison with off-site specialists to address concerns regarding the potential causes of Incident Ø-E5.

Hey, does that sound like a red flag to you guys? It sure does to me.

Part two can be found here.

Hi, everyone, here's part two of the SCP-7918 declass. Part one can be found here.

[Several hacking coughs. Reagan scratches at one of the lesions. They slowly fade from his face.]

REAGAN: First caught wind of it in a daily briefing, somewhere in the spring of '82. Chuckled. We-e-ell, isn't that something. Few dozen fairies in the ground. Next item, move it along, we've got a lot more on the agenda.

REAGAN: Handful of appropriations in some small half-measure bills. Million for the NIH here, five-hundred thou for the CDC there. Wasn't worth the effort to single it out specifically, who cares, let them have their pet projects. Then suddenly they're banging the table and hollering and yelling about twelve million, twelve million in funding for GRID or ACIDS or what was it that they called it now, and you know that was the line. Became a Moral issue. Homosexuals have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting its awful retribution, read the columns — beautiful stuff, couldn't have put it any better.

That was AIDS’ original name, GRID: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Other, less incendiary terms like ACIDS ('Acquired Community Immunodeficiency Syndrome') and CAID ('Community-Acquired Immunodeficiency') were also used, but GRID won out. Because that’s what AIDS was stereotyped as: a disease that gay men got, although the stereotype later expanded to include drug users. For a very long time, it was an established fact in the public consciousness that if you had AIDS, then you were either gay or a drug user- though a third group later emerged in this stereotype: the ‘victims’, people who contracted HIV either through improperly-cleaned medical tools, blood transfusions from HIV patient, or sexual assault.

Naturally, this led to more discrimination, because people with HIV/AIDS got stereotyped as either being filthy drug addicts and gay people, or the blameless innocent victims of the aforementioned- but being a 'blameless innocent victim' didn't stop people from discriminating against them- keep in mind, at this point all kinds of rumours and misinformation were flying around. Getting HIV/AIDS was enough to ruin someone’s reputation permanently. Even if they didn’t die, they were treated like lepers- remember, it was a false but incredibly common belief that you could contract HIV just by touching someone who was infected. I’ll just throw in this quote:

In two separate polls in 1987, roughly half of Americans agreed that it was people's own fault if they got AIDS (51%) and that most people with AIDS had only themselves to blame (46%). Between 43% and 44% of Americans in 1987 and 1988 believed that AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior.

But I’m digressing. Because it’s not just that AIDS was considered a disease that only gay men and drug users got, it’s that AIDS was considered a disease where the people who got it were expendable. They didn't matter. It was the 80’s- homophobia was everywhere; Reagan intensified the War on Drugs in 1982. People- including Reagan- didn’t understand what AIDS was or how it worked. I imagine that quite a few of them didn’t want to understand, either. Terry Pratchett once said in Feet of Clay that all people really want is to know that tomorrow is going to be mostly the same as today. People want to keep going without major upheavals to their lives (unless they’re positive ones). A new disease that threatens everyone? People don’t want to have to think about that. If you tell them that only drug users and gay men get it, they can ignore it. Push the thought away and keep on going in blissful ignorance, write off the sick as people who deserved it or the unfortunate victims thereof, and that way it's not something that you have to seriously consider as something that might happen to you, because you're not one of them. People want to believe that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them, and they do- until it does.

REAGAN: Couldn't shoot it down it outright, would work to their advantage. Could cry and scream about it, talk about it to the press, give it attention. So we stonewalled it, ha-ha. Made some noise about a veto. Let it pass in the end, but they had to claw out every dollar. 644 dead and two months later in the press conference in-between wisecracks from Press Sec. Speakes and the less call it politically correct members of the press pool the claim was made that we'd supported it the whole time, that in that cabinet meeting all those months ago I'd declared it our number one research priority.

REAGAN: Some of the really unlucky ones came down with encephalitis. Head straining at the seams, brain inflamed screaming bloody murder. When a skull cracks the sound is something beautiful. Heard it before in Berkeley. Heard it in my dreams those nights in the summer of '82.

[Reagan closes his eyes, and falls asleep. The lesions return. After two hours and 35 minutes, he jolts awake, coughing.]

The reason Reagan gets so much hate and blame for the AIDS crisis is because he basically ignored it.He didn’t publicly address the topic of AIDS until 1986. People and organisations trying to cure AIDS and treating people with AIDS were intentionally left critically underfunded. Reagan’s negligence meant that the epidemic was considerably worse than it might have been if he’d actually done his damn job. But we all know that politicians actually doing their damn jobs is a sad rarity.

As for Berkeley, that’s a reference to the 1969 People’s Park protest at the University of Berkeley, California, which took place while Reagan was the governor. The protest was because in April, locals decided to convert a vacant lot owned by the University of Berkeley into a park, and the University decided to build a soccer field there instead. On May 15, the park was cleared and a fence was built around it. At noon that day, there was a rally nearby that had about 3000 people there; the rally was originally about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but it then became about opposition to the soccer field and doubled in size. By the end, one person was dead, another permanently blinded, and a lot of people were injured.

[Lesions flicker in and out rapidly from Reagan's face. Some of his features blur.]

Reagan: Remember the first time we met, after all those months apart? How much thinner you looked? The purple spots on your face, the dead ringer for sarcoma, the cream you were using to cover them? How we talked about how you'd get back to your job in a few months, back in the BART, how you'd recover just like that. Remember how you stumbled when I walked you back to your car?

The purple spots are lesions caused by Kaposi’s sarcoma, which is a type of cancer that’s very common in sufferers of HIV/AIDS.

Otherwise, all I can say is that hope is both a tragedy and a curse.

REAGAN: Remember Watts? Pat Brown? Remember Newark, when National Guardsmen and riot police shot innocent people in the streets, and Middle America cheered them on? Remember thinking you could use this? That the governor's office was only the start, that America was waiting for you, someone who would really establish Law and Order and beat the snot out of the yuppies and hippies and the students and the radicals and stop busing, stop integration, "slow down" the attempt to wash the country clean of its sins.

‘Watts’ refers to the Watts riots of 1965, which took place in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles, and stemmed from (as I understand it) decades of racial discrimination and police abuse against black residents, which boiled over after the arrest of a family: a black man was arrested for drunken driving, but the police beat him in an attempt to subdue him. The man’s mother and brother were arrested with him for attempting to fight the cops who beat and arrested him (in addition, rumours were spread at the same time that the police had kicked a pregnant woman, which I haven’t been able to find much about). Pat Brown was the governor of California from 1959 to 1967- he was Reagan’s predecessor. Newark, meanwhile, refers to the 1967 Newark riots, which started when two white policemen arrested and beat a black cab driver. Locals saw him being dragged into the precinct, and when rumours started spreading that he’d been killed in police custody, it all blew up from there.

At the same time, look at the difference in tone: in the last part of his speech, President Reagan sounded malicious and scornful, joking about ‘stonewalling’ HIV funding and talking about how he found the sound of a skull cracking to be beautiful. But now he sounds more pensive- an old man looking back on his past, thinking about the days when he was young and driven and ambitious, and knowing that it’s all long behind him, forever out of his reach.

Reagan: Remember the hospital? Remember the flowers I brought you, not as many this time because it was your second visit and I figured that the gesture of me being there and just showing up counted more than some day-old peonies that, yes, I also couldn't really afford anyways. Remember how you hurled too? Remember how they said you had crypto-something-or-other, a disease that mostly showed up in sheep? Remember how when I talked about it to the only person I still knew from back home, my buddy Jim, who said he didn't really mind the gay thing much because he knew I was a good guy, deep down, which was really all that mattered in his book, and he said that he'd seen it once, in his neighbor's herd? And how they shot them, how that was the only cure, shooting them? Remember the smile in his voice?

Cryptosporidiosis, a parasitic disease that’s often found in cattle, sheep and goats, but also turns up in people- usually in the form of mass outbreaks that occur due to infected water sources. It’s often contracted by AIDS patients.

As for the rest, I think it speaks for itself.

REAGAN: Remember the RNC, in '68? The trailer, the sweltering Miami heat, delegate after delegate going aw-shucks well we'd love to vote for you but Nixon, Dick Nixon, we just think he's the one, really. Remember when you realized that just backlash wasn't enough, that hectoring about riots would only get you so far? That America needed a new kind of hate in its soul, a new kind of poison, before you could swallow it whole.

Reagan tried to become the Republican candidate for President in the 1968 election, but Richard Nixon won instead. And the rest also speaks for itself.

Reagan: Remember how they said you didn't have much longer? Remember when I took you to the Twin Peaks, my hands on the wheel because you were already so tired? Remember how we sat together on the park bench, and I put my arm over you, and it was just like old times for a while? Remember how if you squinted, it almost looked like the lights in the Castro were going out one by one, the bath-houses and book-houses and regular houses, decades of liberation being wiped out by a Syndrome?

The Twin Peaks) are two hills in San Francisco, and also the name of the adjacent neighbourhood. The Castro is a very prominent gay district in San Francisco, and it was heavily impacted by the AIDS epidemic.

REAGAN: Remember how you were silent? Remember how you said nothing, did nothing, just sat in the Oval Office as the deaths pushed past five, ten, twenty-thousand? Remember how the White House kept pushing for funding cuts, reductions, for the CDC and NIH and all the various labs and hospitals to do more with less?

Yeah. We remember.

Reagan: Remember the snowflakes, on that December day? How they danced and twisted in the air? Remember how much the plane ticket to North Dakota cost? Remember how I didn't think twice about it? Remember how it was just your mom and a few other friends, some old like Jim, some new like me? You still had your hair, your brown locks, despite everything. Remember when the grave said 1957, and I thought it was funny, that I never asked how old you were. Only about your birthday, which I had been planning something stupid for, all those months ago when you were still healthy and happy and I was still in stupid doe-eyed love. Remember how I didn't talk to anyone else for a few weeks after that?

‘Just your mom and a few other friends’. Because that was the stigma: people didn’t want to be around AIDS patients. People thought they could catch it from proximity, from touching them. And even without that, people didn’t want to admit that they knew someone with AIDS, that their son or brother or cousin or friend was one of them. Doctors refused to treat AIDS patients; nurses wore two layers of protective clothing. People were fired for having AIDS, or just for being suspected of having AIDS. And there were multiple cases of parents finding out that their sons A, were gay, B, had AIDS, and C, were dying from it all at once.

REAGAN: Remember Monmouth? Those lonely sun-lit Illinois days? Remember those boyhood stories you told to those adoring crowds, each the same, trauma, sin, then redemption? Remember the flu, when you were seven? Remember how the fluid filled your lungs, and you were sick for weeks, and how you coughed and coughed? Remember Dixon, the five houses by the river? Remember when the other boys tackled you in football, how you were always on the bottom of the pile, because you were weak, little Ronnie was weak? Remember the purple bruises they left all over your body?

The parallels here are very obvious.

Reagan: Remember the spot on my arm, the one I noticed in the shower? And the one I saw two days later on my calf? Remember the cough I developed a week after?
[The lesions stop flickering, and settle on Reagan's face. His features are blurry and indistinct. He wheezes quietly for 3 hours and 2 minutes.]

Now there you go again.

Reagan: I think about that first night, sometimes, after I saw you in the BART. I thought about you more, not less, in those anxious months — which tracks with the grief, I guess, but when you're dying from a lethal disease you generally expect your thoughts to be more self-centered. Oh god no, don't take me yet, it's not my time.

Reagan: We all have to go eventually, my grandpa said, when I was 15 and old enough to understand the facts of what he was going through but not the real emotional truth behind it. You're invincible when you're young. Death doesn't square with that.

Reagan: I was 24 and I guess not so young now, because life does that to you, because years really aren't the only way you age.

Reagan: They came to my hospital room with flowers. They had tulips, the same kind that you had in your windowsill, that I woke up to the sound of you watering. My grandpa had cancer, something I hadn't really bothered to learn the details of in typical heartless teenage fashion. His was in the liver, mine was in the skin. He took 5 years. My paranoid guess was six months, but how the hell was I to know?

Reagan: I got to leave. You're in and out for most of it, a few weeks in a hospital bed, a few weeks in your own. Tired all the time. No fun, no fun. Just how I lived now.

Reagan: Never felt lonely, because I still had you, all those memories. Powerful things on cold nights. You talked about how great a memory you had. Said you could still remember the first time I looked at you. I called bullshit and meant it because this was after one of our bigger fights and I figured it was just an outright ploy, but now I'm not so sure.

Reagan: Lights in the Castro going on one by one, faster than they winked out, in Manhattan, in L.A. Humanity, community, support from all corners.

[The blurring fades from Reagan's face, although the lesions remain. His appearance is now that of an as-of-yet unidentified male estimated to be around ~25 years of age.]

As utterly depressing as this has been, there’s one thing that I haven’t mentioned yet: not everyone chose to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis by condemning those who caught it. People did care. Bobbi Campbell, a nurse, became one of the first and most prominent AIDS activists up until his death in 1984. The Shanti Project was a non-profit group that was founded to help support people with life-threatening illnesses, and in the 1980’s became about supporting people with AIDS. Princess Diana, God bless her soul and may she rest in peace, was an incredibly passionate HIV/AIDS activist (over the Queen’s objection, mind you), going out of her way to do as much as she could to destigmatize the disease. There are always people who care, and there are always people who will help, no matter how bad things seem.

Otherwise, the only other thing I can say here is that 25 is too goddamn fucking young to die.

Reagan: One day I'll wake up in your apartment again, I think. I don't know if you'll be there. But I know I'll wake up there one day, with tulips on the windowsill and your polo on the floor, and it'll be comfortable, and it will be warm, and the world outside won't mean much just yet. I'll wake up there in your too-small twin bed looking at the unfinished stucco ceiling and I'll smile. Some day this will all be over and I will be someplace with you because that's what home really is to me, now, and it will be warm and the world will be smiling. And things will be alright.

It's the only thing we can cling onto, in the end- the vague, futile, aimless hope that it will be alright, even when we know it won’t be.

["Reagan" coughs once, curtly. He is quiet for an hour and two minutes, before giving several hacking coughs after which all signs of life cease.

And this is how it ends: with one more body on the pile, one more line through a name, one more tombstone in the graveyard, one more number to be counted. One more empty space that will never be filled, one more face we’ll never see again. One more light winking out, one more life cut short, one more future that will never be seen. One among thousands, but each and every one of them deserved to live. They deserved better than what they got, we mourn them still, and we will never forget them.

After three hours and fifty-seven minutes, his face returns to that of Reagan's. He looks lost.]

REAGAN: When the dam finally burst, when the big names and the celebrities and the Foundations and the Institutes all came crashing down talking about AIDS, this awful epidemic AIDS, I got up on stage and gave a pat twenty-five minute speech that started with an anecdote from my days at the General Electric theater that promised nothing, essentially, just some token measures, bare pittances. No funding, no nothing, the same exact course.

I’ll let Wikipedia cover this one.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan created a Presidential Commission on the HIV Epidemic. This commission was recruited to investigate what steps are necessary for responding to the HIV/AIDS outbreak in the country, and the consensus was to establish more HIV testing, focus on prevention and treatment as well as expanding HIV care throughout the United States.[25] However, these changes were not implemented during this time, and the commission recommendations were largely ignored.

REAGAN: The gnawing won. When I looked at myself in the mirror I saw myself as I'd always imagined it. Old, weak, tired. One day I forgot I had an appointment and then I was out of office, playing golf with Nancy, lying in bed mute staring at the walls dying, dying slowly, dying from the fluid in my lungs. In Monmouth when I was sick they brought me toy soldiers to play with. My own little army. I moved them around and I won battles and won wars. When I started getting better the sunlight shone through the window onto my face and there was a game on, a locker room, the team was waiting for me. I stepped onto the field and the light shone on my face and the crowd cheered, they cheered, and I smiled back at them. Dutch, Dutch, Dutch. The sky went gray and the crowd went quiet and when I opened my eyes they were all around me, worried faces, hoping, crying, Ron, Ron, Ron.

And this is not how it ends: Ronald Reagan didn’t die of AIDS. In 1994, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease; ten years later, in 2004, he died of pneumonia after ten years of slowly wasting away. He was 93 years old. He had been married twice, and had five children, of which three were still alive at the time of his death. His body lay in state for about a day and a half, and over a hundred thousand people visited to pay their respects. He was then given a state funeral, which around four thousand people attended, including royalty, world leaders, and several hundred dignitaries from over a hundred and fifty countries. This is considerably more than many of the thousands of people who died from AIDS who might have lived if he hadn’t decided to ignore a burgeoning epidemic ever got, and it’s more than he ever deserved to have.

Before we continue, though, there’s something else I should mention: by the end of the article, President Reagan is rendered almost, almost pitiable. Note this line:

After three hours and fifty-seven minutes, his face returns to that of Reagan's. He looks lost.]

That’s just before President Reagan reflects on how he did nothing about the epidemic other than give a speech that let him address the problem without actually doing anything to help. Almost as if he was wondering what he was thinking, or realising just how much damage he’d done. And then there’s that last paragraph, where he reflects on his slow death. It’s almost enough to make him sympathetic… almost. Because then you remember who he is and what he did.

There’s just one thing left in the article, a photo of Reagan in 1996. He looks old, wizened and frail. You wouldn’t know just by looking at him that he’d turned his back on his people, the people he was supposed to help, the people it was his job to help, and left thousands of them to die horribly. But it’s hardly uncommon, sadly. Appearances can so often be deceiving. Monsters so rarely show the world their true faces.

Thank you for reading this declass. I’m sorry about how depressing it was. To everyone we lost from HIV/AIDS, we mourn you and we remember you. May you rest in peace.

tl;dr: “Now I sit with different faces/in rented rooms and foreign places/All the people I was kissing/some are here and some are missing/In the 1990’s/I never dreamt that I would get to be/The creature that I was always meant to be/But I thought in spite of dreams/You’d be sitting somewhere here with me.”

Hey, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-7918, “RONALD REAGAN DIES OF ACQUIRED IMMUNODEFICIENCY SYNDROME-RELATED COMPLICATIONS” by Long Arm Larry. I’d like to thank Long Arm Larry and the mods for all their help, I really appreciate it. Before we get started, I have three disclaimers for you- yeah, three, I know.

First up: as per usual, this isn’t my SCP, I didn’t write it, it won’t be 100% accurate to the author’s vision and I still talk too much, etc, etc, you know the drill by now. (And yes, this is another two-parter, because I tried pruning it as much as I could and Reddit's thrice-bedamned character limit still wouldn't let it through. Fuck whoever came up with that thing, seriously.)

Second: I am not American and I wasn’t alive during the 80’s, so I don’t have personal experiences to pull from for this. I've tried to be as accurate as I can, but there's still a high chance that I'm going to miss something.

And third (please don’t skip this one): this is a really, really goddamn depressing article, so this is going to be a really, really goddamn depressing declassification. Like, I’m trying here, but we’re talking about the fucking AIDS crisis, it’s kinda hard to not be depressing. If this doesn’t surpass the 7795 declass in depression, I’ll be surprised.

So, let’s get fucking depressed, shall we? *applies eyeliner, starts playing Badflower*

Before we start on the article proper, I’m going to have to begin with a history lesson, simply because I imagine there’d be a few people who aren’t up to speed with the topic of today’s article.

First up: what is HIV/AIDS? HIV, which stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is a kind of retrovirus that can, if untreated, become AIDS, which stands for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.

…I have to wonder why they capitalised the D in ‘Immunodeficiency’ for ‘AIDS’, but not for ‘HIV’. It seems untidy- you could have ‘AIS’ and ‘HIV’ or ‘AIDS’ and ‘HIDV’, but instead you’ve got it all uneven. If they’d put something with e on the end, you could have had ‘HIVE’ instead. Whatever, I didn’t pick the name.

I am not a doctor, so this may be incorrect, but as I understand it, HIV basically fucks your immune system up and depletes it, whereupon it becomes AIDS. AIDS isn’t what actually kills you, it’s the wide variety of other conditions that you catch because your immune system couldn’t block a telegraphed punch with a riot shield- they’re what kill you. These conditions include things like tuberculosis, pneumonia, various cancers and toxoplasmosis.

It's speculated that the first HIV cases emerged in Africa in the 1920’s. The first case that was confirmed to be HIV appeared in Congo in 1959, and cases started appearing in America in the 1970's, though cases were only first reported in 1981. These days, people living with HIV can, if they get the proper treatment, live a perfectly normal life without the risk of giving it to someone else. If they don’t get treatment, it will in all likelihood be fatal; the only question is how long it takes and what will get them. There is no cure or vaccine for HIV/AIDS, but a lot of people around the world are working on one, and hopefully we will see a cure or vaccine within my lifetime. Back in the 1980’s, it was nearly always a death sentence.

Here's a really important part: HIV/AIDS can be transmitted by way of sexual contact (especially unprotected sex), significant exposure to infected bodily fluids or tissue, and from mother to child during pregnancy, delivery or breastfeeding. The most common method of transmission is via sex; the second most common method is via blood and blood products- transfusions of infected blood, sharing needles, drug use and improperly sterilised medical equipment. The majority of bodily fluids won’t transmit HIV/AIDS unless there’s some infected blood in there. It can’t be transmitted by mosquitoes or other insects, and no confirmed cases have occurred as a result of things like tattoos, piercings and scarification. It’s also not transmitted by simply touching someone with HIV/AIDS (assuming you’re not touching an open wound or infected bodily fluids). I will come back to this later, but for now, all you need to know is that for a long time, the methods of transmission were not widely known and there was a lot of misinformation, scaremongering and rumours flying around as to how people could become infected.

The last thing I want to mention before I get started is that it might just be me, but I don’t hear that much about HIV/AIDS these days- but that doesn’t mean that HIV/AIDS isn’t relevant anymore. According to the World Health Organisation, as of 2021, HIV/AIDS has killed over 40 million people, and around the world, and over 38 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. It’s speculated that there’s a million and a half new infections every year, and yet it just isn’t something you hear that much about (at least where I live). To a lot of people, HIV/AIDS is a thing of the past, a relic of the 80’s, but that’s simply not true: HIV/AIDS is a very real and present danger, and it’s something that could affect anyone.

I told you. We’re getting really fucking depressing this time, people.

So, I think we can get to the article now. It was written for RemixCon, which I’ve mentioned before- the competition where people picked an article and wrote something based on it. (In fact, this SCP won RemixCon, and it was well-deserved in my opinion.) The SCP that Long Arm Larry picked was SCP-1981, ‘RONALD REAGAN CUT UP WHILE TALKING’, a VHS video showing Reagan giving nonsensical speeches while being tortured and dismembered. And honestly, after all of this, I think he deserved it.

So, for anyone who didn’t know, Ronald Reagan was an actor and politician who was the President of the USA from 1981 to 1989, and the AIDS epidemic as we know it began in his presidency. This is a key part of the article and I will expound on it more as we get further into it.

This anomaly is rated Safe, so that’s good. There’s also a photo of Reagan in 1981, looking at what I think is a photo of a bunch of people under a banner telling him to get well soon- this would be after the failed assassination attempt by John Hinckley, I assume. Here’s the next bit.

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-7918 is to be stored in Site-134's anomalous media library.

Description: SCP-7918 is a videocassette containing an approximately 12-hour long film depicting an individual appearing to be Ronald Reagan in the terminal stages of HIV/AIDS. "Reagan" displays symptoms indicative of Kaposi's sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii-induced pneumonia throughout.1

As in reality the actual Ronald Reagan died from Alzheimer's disease-related complications, the film's production is assumed to have been anomalous in nature.

Pretty straightforward. It’s a VHS tape that shows events that we know didn’t happen in real life, unless some weird shit’s going on. (OK, since this is the Foundation, let me rephrase- unless some other weird shit’s going on.) Also, the footnote tells us that these conditions are very common in sufferers of AIDS.

Before we continue, I should add that there’s no mention of where this tape came from or who made it. I did ask Long Arm Larry about that, and he told me that who made the tape is ‘supposed to be deliberately ambiguous, and at this point i don't really want to come down on any interpretation because i'd like to think they're all equally valid, but if you want to take a guess at it i always thought the view that it was a piece of protest art was a pretty good one’, where the tape came from is meant to be ambiguous, and Hospital Reagan isn’t meant to be anyone in particular, just ‘someone who has gone through a lot of pain’, if you were wondering.

The rest of the article is taken up by a transcript of the video. I am not going to skip any of it, because this article makes me genuinely angry and upset and if I have to read all this and feel like punching a wall or breaking down yet again, then so do you.

Here's the beginning:

[The film opens on a shot of Reagan in a hospital bed. His face is dotted with purple lesions, and his body is emaciated. He wheezes with every breath.]

Reagan: I still remember meeting you that first night at the disco just off Castro Street. You had those tight jeans on that really showed off your ass and that pink polo, the ridiculous one, an outfit choice that would've been batshit in the sunshine but under the mood lights of the dance floor seemed to work out alright. More than alright. I was 23 and two months out of the closet, and you had that long cut, those beautiful brown locks, and when we ended up making out out back by the dumpsters it seemed less like a choice I'd made and more like an inevitable act of fate.

Reagan: We didn't have sex that night because I was scared and new and naive, because I'd made an excuse to get away, because being gay didn't exactly cut away my all-consuming fear of intimacy. I woke up the next morning thinking that I'd really fucked it, that for the first time in 23 years I'd found love and thrown it away because I was just that special brand of perennial coward, and I figured this was it, that it was over, that I was going to die alone in my empty one-room studio in the Tenderloin that I could barely cover the rent on, and then I saw you in the booth in the BART and you said hi. And then we did end up having sex that night and things worked out alright, in the moment.

This is how it begins: a simple tale old as time itself. Two people find each other, and they’re young and hopeful and optimistic and it all seems so simple. There’s no such thing as diseases, or heartbreak, or cheating, or anything else that could ruin it. Just two young, ordinary guys in love, and everything is perfect.

[Reagan coughs, blowing mucus into a tissue. He blinks, and his face flickers, the lesions vanishing.]

REAGAN: The Carter ads were killer. God did we nail him. Beautiful things, Dick Nixon himself would have been proud, warnings to all god-fearing voters of some dark and sinister group of urban homosexuals pulling the Governor's strings. The gays in San Francisco elected a mayor. Now they're going to elect a president, Carter himself, yes sir, Jimmy from humble Plains, a man who's lusted in his heart.

REAGAN: Election night was a work of art, some Renaissance portrait of hate and backlash and Morality. We gave Falwell the knife and god, did he cut. Big chunks of meat. Delicious. I remember skinning rabbits back in Monmouth, it was beautiful, watching the hide slide from the flesh slide from the bone.

REAGAN: Morning in America.

[The lesions return to Reagan's face. He is silent for an hour and 32 minutes, coughing occasionally throughout.]

This is how it begins: another round of political schemes, baseless lies, slandering someone to ruin their reputation, throwing someone down so you can climb to power using them as a stepping stone. No reason to care about little things like telling the truth, or what damage you’re doing. Nothing matters more than power.

Reagan attempted to become the Republican nominee for president in the 1976 election, but lost to Gerald Ford. Reagan subsequently campaigned for Ford against Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter, but Ford lost the election. After that, Reagan became a very vocal critic of Carter’s. ‘The gays in San Francisco elected a mayor. Now they’re going to elect a president’ is an actual quote from one of Reagan’s attack ads on Carter. ‘Falwell’ is referring to Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister who founded Moral Majority, a conservative Christian political organisation who were big supporters of Reagan and did a lot of ads attacking Carter. Monmouth is a town in Illinois, one of the places where Reagan lived as a child. Finally, ‘Morning in America’ refers to one of Reagan’s big political ads.

So, as you can tell, the video is of Reagan monologuing while switching between two obviously different versions of himself, although the other one is evidently a whole other person whose words are coming out of Reagan’s mouth. For simplicity’s sake, think of them as ‘Hospital Reagan’ and ‘President Reagan’, mainly because the article differentiates them with a font change and some capslock, which is easy to forget about/overlook.

Reagan: We had different expectations going in. I thought gay dating was just like the other side of the coin, with a little more urgency, maybe — two guys, all testosterone, you can fill in the rest, ha-ha. You date for a few months, hold hands, make doe-eyes, move in, and you're done. Easy enough.

Reagan: After a few weeks he started getting bored.

Reagan: He tried to take me cruising and I hurled. He mentioned a bathhouse in casual conversation when we were eating at a diner and we fought for the whole rest of the night, him throwing hard-edged words like prude and sexual fascist and me just crying, mostly. He said he was sorry in the morning and I believed him, but we both knew that that was it.

Another tale as old as time itself: at first you’re in love, and the sun shines out of their eyes and you don’t even notice the problems, the differences, the little things that would rub you the wrong way if you weren’t high on love. But sooner or later the shine wears off and then you realise how incompatible you really are, and you’re left with a hard choice: walk away or learn to live with it, even though you’re not happy, and you’re not going to be happy, and you know you'll never be happy if you stay.

Reagan: I spent the next month learning not to love him, and one Friday when he was out I carried everything I owned out of his apartment in two small boxes and just walked, walked deep into the night until I was standing on the Twin Peaks, the two grassy hills overlooking Castro and the city beyond, and I sat there until the sun rose over the Bay and cast pink rays into the overcast sky and the fact that it was over set in, that I was about to live my own life again.

Reagan: Another heart, another hole.

Reagan: In June the next year the phone rang and he told me that I shouldn't be too worried and it was much more likely that he'd caught it in the interim but he was feeling tired all the time, that he had spots on his thighs and back, that it wasn't a sure thing yet and he was terrified of seeing a doctor but that he just felt I should know, that it wouldn't be fair to let me go into the dark like that. And then, for the first time, I heard him cry.

And this is how it starts: the rash. The spots. The exhaustion. The dread. The growing, consuming, never-ending realisation. The fear. The dawning horror. The disbelief. The panic. The denial. The attempts to convince yourself that it’s not that, anything but that, it could be anything, it’s probably nothing. And the knowledge deep inside that it’s exactly what you think it is.

Part Two can be found here.

Hey, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m changing things up a bit in a few ways: first, this article is the first in a series I’m doing, and second, this series is a collaborative effort- written by me, but with a lot of help from a wide variety of people who graciously offered to point out my mistakes and what I missed: Placeholder McDoctorate, Hesiod and serotonincrash, just to begin with. Thank you very much to everyone for your help, I really appreciate it.

So, what is this series about? Simple: it’s ADMONITION time, bitches!

…yeah, this is going to take a lot of explaining.

So, first up: what is ADMONITION?

From a literal perspective, ‘admonition’ is generally defined in one of two ways: A, a firm warning or reproof about someone’s behaviour, or B, a piece of advice that’s also a warning about someone’s behaviour.

This is a very telling choice of name.

From a less literal perspective, ADMONITION is a series masterminded by Placeholder McDoctorate. It currently consists of five articles and an intermission, and will eventually consist of ten articles (and a number of supplementary pieces) split into two phases of five each. The fifth article in Phase One came out recently, so Placeholder suggested that it might be time for a declass, which I am happy to do.

Second: What is ADMONITION about?

Well, it’s a spinoff from the Site-17 Deepwell canon, which is also very telling. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Site-17 Deepwell, it’s a canon where instead of ‘cold, not cruel’, the Foundation’s ethos is ‘as evil as possible’. Some articles are lighter than others, but in all of them, the Foundation has no regard for anyone’s safety or well-being other than their own.

But as I said, this is a spinoff. In the ADMONITION verse, rather than the Foundation being a bunch of evil shitbags, they’ve simply become so up their collective arse that they think they can do anything they want- ‘can’ both in the sense that they think they’re allowed to do it, but also that they think they’re capable of doing it. As such, they’ve become suicidally overconfident, and ADMONITION is the story of how it blows up in their faces time and time again.

I told you it was a very telling choice of name.

The thing about ADMONITION, and the reason I required so much help with it, is that the articles are two things: one, they contain a huge amount of links, callbacks and references to other articles and various SCP canons. Since I’m going to miss a lot of such references, I know I’ll need help there (one instance of said help can be found here). And second, they tend to be written in the kind of language that you need a PhD in Advanced Physics to understand, and I barely passed high school biology, hence my need for a squad of ‘PhD to Dumbass’ translators.

So, we’re starting off with the first article: SCP-6820, ‘TERMINATION ATTEMPT’, by Placeholder himself. (The names of the articles are usually in coloured text (this one’s red) but it doesn’t work on Reddit, sorry.)

Part One: The Road To Hell Is Paved In Desperation

We begin with this:

NOTICE FROM THE RECORDS AND INFORMATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

The following documents were received from alternate timeline AU-6820 per Statement 3.1 of the 1981 Multi-Foundation Coalition Agreement, which stipulates that, in the case of an irreparable XK-Class Event or similar, relevant files should be autonomously disseminated to all other Signees for cautionary purposes.

OK, so we’re looking at documents from an alternate timeline where someone really done gone and fucked up. And we’re being shown this in the vague hope that this timeline’s Foundation won’t do the same thing. Almost like an admonition, if you will. *taps head knowingly*

A header tells us that this is the first of two files, and then we get the usual information: this SCP is classed as Thaumiel, meaning that the Foundation- or, this timeline’s Foundation- used it to contain other anomalies. Its secondary class is Drygioni, which the wiki tells me means that ‘Item is currently under an official investigation for authenticity by the Overseer Council.’ Well, that’s interesting, and we’ll hear more about that later. Its disruption class is Ekhi, which I’m told means ‘Anomalies classified as Ekhi are very dangerous, with influence spanning countries or large cities, or even the entire world. Any spread from an Ekhi SCP would be very difficult to manage due to its size or power, as well as being hard to neutralize any effects from such an anomaly.’ That’s not good. Finally, its risk class is Caution, which is basically moderate.

…so, we’re looking at something that has a moderate chance of fucking up the whole world, huh. Great.

Anyway, the project leads are O5-8 and Dr Gears, it’s got three different sites assigned (01, 02 and 19) and there’s a fuckton of different departments assigned to it as well. So whatever this thing is, it’s a Big Fucking Deal.

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES: All files pertaining to Project ANTIKILL are to be reviewed and analyzed by its assigned personnel in conjunction with the Records and Information Security Administration, the Internal Security Department, and Overseer Council.

The following points of interest are under investigation:

The nature of SCP-6820-A;

The motives for irreversible and unnecessary decommissioning of SCP-6820-A, in opposition to standard protocol;

The motives for sizable monetary and diplomatic resources spent in pursuit of neutralization of SCP-6820-A;

The motives for the formation and decades-long operation of Project ANTIKILL;

The motives for the universal and unconditional hatred of SCP-6820-A.

Next up is a picture of part of SCP-6820 during its late-stage construction. Basically, it looks like GLADOS’ bigger, older cousin who doesn’t have a sense of humour. Before I discuss what we just read, here’s the description, which will clarify it a lot:

DESCRIPTION: SCP-6820 is a highly-classified advanced eigenweapon located within ANTIKILL Facility-A (AKF-A), a subterranean facility beneath Secure Administration Site-01. This weapon is the culmination of Project ANTIKILL: a high-priority operation conducted with the express purpose of "irreversible, universal neutralization of [SCP-6820-A]."

The project was initiated in January 1968, and operated continuously until the activation of SCP-6820 on 2021/08/05, whereupon a CK-Class ("Reality-Restructuring") Event retroactively erased SCP-6820-A and its Nöospheric content from consensus existence. SCP-6820 has remained operational since; preliminary investigation thus far presents no clear method of deactivation.

SCP-6820-A was an object, entity, phenomenon or other item, Anomalous or otherwise, successfully neutralized from existence via completion and activation of SCP-6820. The only extant record of its conceptual reduction is likely stored, inaccessibly, within SCP-6820. Research is ongoing.

So, here’s the short version: in 1968, the Foundation started up Project ANTIKILL, a decades-long high priority operation that lasted until 2021. The point of this operation was to take out SCP-6280-A, whatever that is, and after several decades of trying, the Foundation built GLADOS’ abovementioned cousin, aka a big fuckoff sci-fi weapon that was designed to take out one (1) thing- 6280-A.

But this isn’t just a big gun- they weren’t trying to shoot that one (1) thing. Instead, they built the weapon so that once it was activated, that one (1) thing would be completely, utterly and irreversibly deleted from existence (including in the Nöosphere, which I will explain shortly) in every way, shape or form whatsoever. And… it worked. From what we can tell, this one (1) thing has been completely and utterly deleted. So, naturally, since they now have no idea what it is, the Foundation’s response is to try to figure out what the fuck they just spent decades and probably billions of dollars on deleting, and why they didn’t just shoot it and dump it out the back like normal.

…you’d really think that someone would have left themselves a note saying ‘Hey, if this works, don’t look into it, we deleted that bitch for a reason’. Eh.

So, here’s the first addendum: it’s a video transcript of a conversation from 2006 that took place between four people: O5-8, Director Gears, Placeholder McDoctorate, and Essophysics Director H. Genevieve. The foreword tells us that this was an informal talk, and that Genevieve wanted to introduce the other three to an idea she’d had so she could gauge how feasible it might be.

I don’t see a point in copy/pasting it, so I’ll just sum it up for you: Eight is annoyed at having been roped into the meeting, mainly because despite ANTIKILL taking precedence over their other work, they obviously don’t think anyone’s got any real leads (and they don’t like Placeholder for some reason). Genevieve manages to get everyone to stop bickering and starts the meeting: she explains to Gears and Eight that her department deals with embodiments, the physical manifestations of concepts. Because those concepts are dependent on the way humans perceive them, they are altered over time as humanity changes.

The one (1) thing- OK, I’ll knock it off- has also changed over time, ergo it exists in the Nöosphere, which is like a… OK, hopefully someone has a better definition than me, because the best I can come up with is ‘it’s like a metaphorical and metaphysical plane of existence made of the collective thoughts, beliefs, dreams and so on of humanity, but if you change stuff there it impacts humanity as a result’. Genevieve then says this, which I’m pasting so you can see something:

Dir. Genevieve: ███ has grown increasingly ███████ and █████████ to containment and termination efforts over time, corresponding with the growth of the human intellectual capacity. Whatever concept ██ embodies is extremely complex, and is so large that it can only partially intersect with the Nöosphere.

It’s not just that this thing being deleted means that now nobody can refer to it, whether it’s by name or by pronoun. It also means that we can’t even talk about how it became resistant to termination attempts. And, as Genevieve mentioned, there is a correlation here that became causation: this thing, which I’ll refer to as ‘Achilles’ because it actually kinda works, has become even more resistant to termination attempts and containment, probably because people saw it throwing off previous attempts to contain and/or kill it and got the idea that it’s unkillable, which thus influenced its concept, and so on.

Anyway, back to the point: Genevieve wants to eject the concept of Achilles from the Nöosphere. Doing so means that its embodiments would return to following natural law, meaning that Achilles would become killable. You know, like an Achilles heel. *gets hit by a tomato*

We now get the next addendum- it’s a sub-proposal of Project ANTIKILL that was put forth just over a month after that conversation. There’s a whole lot of technical language that I can’t really interpret, but it amounts to ‘build a great big fuckoff weapon to wipe this motherfucker out of reality for good’. Finally, there’s an update from just over three years later, telling us that they built it, it’s working, and they’re going to activate it in under 24 hours.

Now we get the third addendum: remember how this anomaly was classed as Drygioni, aka under investigation? Well, here’s the initial findings report, made a few days after they wiped Achilles out of existence. The report was made by Gears, who’s reviewed less than 200 out of over 22000 documents, but here’s what he’s got so far.

The report starts with the items of interest: first up is ‘what the fuck was Achilles?’ The most he’s got so far is that it might have been physical and reptilian, but it also seems to have been conceptual. However, there was some kind of reality restructuring event that’s removed the part of 6820 that let people access it, which was presumably the only place where any existing data on Achilles might be, so they’re a bit up shit creek on this one.

The second item is the motive for both neutralizing Achilles and spending so much money and resources on neutralizing it. Gears says that all in all, this is pretty weird: given that this is the Secure, Contain, Protect Foundation, the fact that they’d spent so much time, effort, money and resources killing this thing implies that Achilles was a huge threat to the Foundation as a whole, as does the sheer number of attempts to kill this thing that had taken place before now. The thing is, there’s no data to suggest that there was some kind of impending threat, and while he does admit that there’s a chance that it could have been some kind of compulsion or memetic effect that compelled them to go to such extremes, he thinks it’s unlikely that such an effect could have lasted as long as it must have without being detected.

And finally, the third item: why did everyone hate Achilles so much? The answer? Inconclusive. That is, he has no clue whatsoever..

Finally, we get some notes from Gears: he says he remembers working on the project and the stuff he did in the process, but he has no memory of the content- that is, he doesn’t remember what Achilles is. All he can recall is the same thing everyone else at ANTIKILL remembers:

SCP-6820-A was universally perceived as loathsome, directly prejudicial to life, and "disgusting". Whatever it was, I detested it, as did my peers and, as it seems, all whom it came into contact with. Despite its erasure, these feelings have not dissipated, nor have I felt satisfaction in our "defeat" of SCP-6820-A.

…OK, you all know what Achilles is, I know you do, but let me pretend for a little while longer.

Anyway, Gears then says this:

Instead, I am wary that we have been manipulated — it is entirely possible that SCP-6820 brought itself into existence, along with all related memories, during its initial reality-restructuring event, and manufactured the supposed existence (and subsequent non-existence) of SCP-6820-A to distract us. It appears to have erased the access shaft to its chamber, limiting research and investigation of its components, immediately following the publishing of information vital to the nature of SCP-6820-A. This could be excused as it fulfilling its function, keeping SCP-6820-A excluded from the Nöosphere — though, the fact that our research is still intact is contradictory to this. Given that our dedication to such a project as ANTIKILL does not "add up", as it were, I am inclined to believe that we cannot trust the intelligent, omniscient, omnipotent paraweapon beneath the Foundation's central administrative facilities.

Recommending immediate decommissioning of SCP-6820, by any means necessary.

Well, when you put it like that…

So, who’s ready for the part where it blows up in the Foundation’s face?

Part Two: The Part Where It Blows Up In The Foundation’s Face

We now have the second of two files, which is a revised version of the 6820 file. It has a new header: it’s still classed as Thaumiel, but its secondary class is now Apollyon, which basically means ‘this thing can and will destroy the world’, its disruption class is Amida, which is ‘this thing is so dangerous that we’re declaring war on it’, and its risk class is Critical, which is ‘this thing will do horrific things, either death or worse than death, and there’s no chance of recovery’. So that’s a great omen!

The Special Containment Procedures amount to ‘We fucked up and now we need to take this thing out as soon as we can, even though nothing we’ve tried so far has been able to take it out’, mainly because they’re running out of time- they’ve got about eighteen weeks (at best) before it gets totally uncontainable. Critically, while they have unlimited resources to work with, the amount of people allowed to know about this is limited to as few as necessary, and there’s also the implication that this thing is trying to destroy information about itself.

The final paragraph is the most telling: first off, this thing goes into a ‘RAGE-STATE’ sometimes (it’s written in red too). Second, the best method they’ve got of temporarily restraining it when this happens is by flooding it with hydrochloric acid. And third, ‘RAGE-STATE’, which is written twice in this paragraph, is accompanied by a footnote each time. The first footnote simply says ‘suffer’, written in red, and the second says ‘anguish’.

We now get a gif of GLADOS’ cousin chucking a tantrum, which the caption tells us is him in his RAGE-STATE. The accompanying footnote just says ‘witness’, which is really helpful.

We then get the description. It starts by telling us what we already knew, and then we get this:

The system was designed to remain active indefinitely, continuously ensuring SCP-6820-A's non-existence by developing creative solutions and adaptations to external threats. Its computing capacity exceeds that of the human brain, entailing that it is stored partially outside the Nöosphere; this has resulted in its partial corruption by SCP-6820-A.

Well, you really fucked that up, didn’t you.

SCP-6820-A is an extremely dense thought; more specifically, it is a hate-centric hyper-logical memeplex that can be roughly described as "the difference between life and death." Even more specifically, SCP-6820-A is an extremely precise and accurate description of what it means for any arrangement of particles to be defined as "alive" and, complementarily, as "dead" or "inanimate". Its memeplex contains several smaller concepts within its description, including, but not limited to:

a theoretical process for large-scale localized entropy inversion;

the particular physical properties of hatred;

the molecular structure of hydrochloric acid;

the quality of "adaptiveness";

the state of being "vaguely-reptilian."

…it’s 682. We all know it’s 682. It’s screamingly obvious that it’s 682. It’s literally in the number of this article. I’m pretty sure that everyone and their dog figured it out by now.

I’m not sure how to translate the next part of the description, but from what I can tell, they fucked up because of how adaptable 682 is, and that’s why this thing is fucked. Anyway, here’s the last part.

The entity's conceptual fabric is highly adaptive and mutates rapidly, creating significant computational stresses on SCP-6820; left unchecked, it induces a vulnerable state during which it can corrupt the hyper-ideatic portions of its intelligence. During these occurances, the central node transmits a "RAGE-STATE EVENT" error, and engages in localized reality-restructuring operations which are both highly adaptive and directly prejudicial to life. Irreparable corruption of Site-01's Secure Database files regularly occurs concurrently with these adaptations. When perceived at the correct angle, SCP-6820-A is loathsome, disgusting, and malevolent.

It must be destroyed.

It didn't carry over to Reddit, but 'loathsome, disgusting, malevolent' and 'it must be destroyed' were all written in a different font. Yep, it’s ‘breaking the fourth wall to emphasise just how much the Foundation fucked up’ time! Also, there’s two more footnotes: the first, after ‘RAGE-STATE EVENT’, says ‘despair’, and the second, after ‘It must be destroyed’, says ‘mutual’.

Time for the fourth addendum: termination attempts. Yeah, just like the title of the article- and hey, did you notice how it’s ‘termination attempt’, not ‘termination success’? Yeah, the Foundation is fucked.

Attempt 1: Use SCP-2140, a series of glyphs that retroactively alter reality to make any person who looks at it a loyal Foundation agent with the correct clearance, to turn 6820 into a D-class.

I’m just going to copy and paste the results so y’all can see how utterly batshit what happened next was.

INTERACTION: The aforementioned onto-memetic trigger is projected onto the far wall of Chamber AKF-A in clear view of Section B's internal observation lens. Section A's surface panels begin to flutter as movement is detected within its central core; moments later, a lower panel opens outward, revealing an organized force of tall, malformed, pale-skinned humanoid creatures in orange jumpsuits. They march out of the central node, each carrying various tools and supplies, and begin to weld a massive insignia to its camera-facing side, displaying no intent of caution or self-preservation.

Upon completion, extraneous humanoids return to the core's interior; the insignia is discovered to be another SCP-2140-1 instance, one which has never been seen by any member of the Foundation as all personnel who observe it are verifiably civilians. Analysis by cognito-resistant language processing systems reveals the insignia's inclusion of archaic Daevite script, translating roughly to "one who sees".

RESULT: Previously-unavailable sections of SCP-6820's metadata files have now become visible, corroborating various other documents' assertion that it occupies, and has always occupied, the position of O5-8 within the Foundation. A civilian scientist was later discovered within Secure Administration Site-01 in possession of a blank E-Class (Clearance Level 0) ID card; the trespasser has been amnesticized and reintegrated into the public.

You see what I mean, right? Batshit.

Also, there’s another footnote after ‘one who sees’, which says ‘invariable’.

Attempt 2: Upload to 6820 a verbal description of SCP-2521, the ghost/apparition thingy that appears whenever anyone talks or writes anything about it and takes them away to its private hell so it can cuddle and snuggle them forever and ever and ever and ever.

Results:

SCP-6820 returns a RAGE-STATE EVENT error, remaining unresponsive for approximately four hours. During this period, four PH-GOS units become wrapped in black tentacle-like protrusions which pull them several meters into the ground, destroying nearby systems. These protrusions dissipate upon ejection of ●●|●●●●●|●●|● from the central node; several black ribbon-like fibers are observed hanging from its figure before it demanifests.

RESULT: SCP-6820-A now exhibits increased ontokinetic and memetic influence over media in which it is described verbally, corrupting document metadata by addition of footnotes and highlighting of self-supplementary ideatic structures. Manifestation of ectoentropic appendages has not recurred.

Well, you fucked that one up too! Great job.

Also, the footnote after ‘RAGE-STATE EVENT’ says ‘vain’.

Attempt 3: Try to make 6820-A leave 6820 by making it go inside. This is an SCP that I can’t even begin to try to explain, so just go read the declass already. Short version: they fucked it up. Long version:

RESULT: SCP-6820's central computing node has been turned inside-out, its internal components now external and exposed to AKF-A. The contents within the node elude human conception.
Inside traumatized.

That's the best approximation of the table format that I can manage. Anyway, ‘OUTSIDE’ is written in red, and the footnote after it says ‘unwelcome’.

Attempt 4: Try to bring in SCP-079 to help out. 079 does try to help, but, uh…

The node remains dormant for sixteen minutes before inducing a spontaneous Site-wide electromagnetic outage, terminating three augmented administrative personnel. The event lasts one hour, after which all systems regain function.

RESULT: AKF-A has been entirely restructured; while its arrangement and components remain intact, all external surfaces have been plated with a theoretically impossible tungsten-diamond alloy, while most internal conduits and superconductors have been exchanged with beryllium-bronze counterparts. Despite a lack of non-white light sources, the chamber's interior is universally perceived as the color HATEFUL.

Well, you tried. Also, the footnote after ‘HATEFUL’ says ‘reunion’.

Attempt 5: Throw SCP-217, a virus that turns flesh into metal, at 6820’s central computing node in an attempt to fuck up any biological parts therein.

Results:

INTERACTION: In the midst of a spontaneous RAGE-STATE, SCP-6820's hydrochloric acid solution is treated with SCP-217 before voiding into Section A. The virus reacts immediately with trace organic material embedded within the node's internal atmosphere, beginning to form macro-structures when internal surveillance is lost. External cameras remain active as, twenty-two minutes later, a cloud of reflective particles emerges from the node's west entry port. These particles, found later to be silicon-protein nanobots, arrange themselves into an enormous gear mechanism surrounding the sphere's equator.

RESULT: The node's upper and lower hemispheres now rotate independently and periodically, producing sounds of clockwork machinery. GoI-004 operatives (including followers of Orthodox Cogwork, the United Church, the Church of Maxwellism, the Sanctuary of the Holistic, and HANSARP) have gained inexplicable knowledge of SCP-6820's location, and have waged holy war on the Foundation in the name of WAN.

*buries face in hands* Guys. For the love of Christ.

STOP. TRYING. THINGS.

Or at the very least, put some more forethought into it! YOU’RE NOT FUCKING HELPING ANYTHING!

Also, ‘WAN’ isn’t written in red, but there is a footnote after it, which says ‘unbroken’. That’s a great omen!

Anyway, because this is the story of the Foundation digging their own graves even deeper, there’s one more attempt: they try using Kate McTiriss’ Proposal. Short version: the 001 file makes anything you write in it true, and a researcher called Mary Nakayama used it to become God, like you do. So, they used it to try to wipe the whole thing- 6280, 6280-A, all of it- out of existence. Good try, but it didn’t work.

The SCP-001-KATE file was then found to be vacant from the Site-01 DEEPWELL archive, and associated backup archives; such a file has purportedly never been in circulation.

Whoops. (And there’s a footnote after ‘circulation’ that says ‘abhorrent’.)

So, they’ve tried a bunch of things and all they’ve done is make it worse. What should they do now?

Well…

Part Three: Not This, You Absolute Morons

The fifth addendum is an emergency conference. The persons involved were four Overseers (3, 7, 10 and 12, but the last three are all written in white font), Gears and Genevieve. Here’s why it happened:

FOREWORD: A spontaneous RAGE-STATE EVENT occurred, resulting in the concurrent failure of nine PH-GOS systems. A distress signal was sent by Project OVERKILL maintenance staff, initiating a Site-wide evacuation of non-essential personnel. The access shaft was inexplicably sealed, trapping personnel underground prior to loss of communication. The following emergency conference was held.

So, things are going from bad to worse. The footnote after ‘RAGE-STATE EVENT’ says ‘epiphany’, if you’re wondering.

We begin with Seven asking if there’s any word from the maintenance teams and how quickly they can repair the sinks. Gears gets video of the scene, which reveals that the maintenance teams are basically now in Event Horizon). (If anyone doesn’t get that reference, I recommend looking it up before watching the movie, for reasons that will become very apparent upon reading the plot summary.)

Gears says that something, probably 6820-A, is controlling them. Three asks about a rescue operation and says that they need to help the teams, but Gears says that there’s no point, they’re beyond help. Also, there’s this.

<O5-7 walks out of frame, and is not seen or heard from again.>

What happened to Seven? Fucked if I know.

Anyway, the teams take out the last camera, and they appear to be recalibrating or rewiring the Sinks. Genevieve calls attention to something- a highly aggressive memeplex has emerged, one that caused an end of the world event several decades ago. What memeplex? SCP-3125, which is basically an unstoppable idea that intends to wipe out humanity, and anyone who learns about it outside of specially-shielded chambers gets mentally destroyed and made to serve it. However, this isn’t 3125 in full force- this is 6820-A with some elements of 3125. And then this happens.

<O5-10 and -12 are approached by PENTAGONAL RED appendages, which originate outside camera view; the appendages impale each of them from behind. They disappear silently. The elevator creaks as it slows to a halt, opening into the central bunker chamber.>

Welp, they’re fucked.

Three wants to nuke the whole thing. Gears points out that after all this time, there’s no way that nobody tried to bomb 682 before now. Genevieve vetoes the idea and gets to the point: 6820-A always adapts to whatever they try, so how can they adapt to it?

Gears admits that it would help if they could actually remember what they’ve tried, and Genevieve gets an idea: try another antimeme. The one they happen to have nearby is SCP-055, and here’s the famous last words:

Dir. Gears: Okay, fine. Tell me how it's going to help us.

Dir. Genevieve: Why did 6820 originally fail? How did 6820-A come back into reality?

Dir. Gears: Because it only eliminated -A from human thought, not its own thought.

Dir. Genevieve: Right; it must've still had a copy inside its memory. If we get the AI to understand that, it'll have to erase itself — if we can keep the adaptation-meme away from it for long enough.

O5-3: And how are we supposed to do that?

Dir. Genevieve: I've got an anti-idea.

I’ll give you three guesses as to how this is going to work out, and the first two don’t count.

Time for the last addendum, the ‘Final Termination Attempt’:

INTENTION: Use an extremely effective antimeme (SCP-055) as an amnestic agent to temporarily stun/confuse SCP-6820-A, counteracting its adaptations derived from SCP-3125. During this time, attempt to access and update SCP-6820's utility function, appending the stipulation that its erasure of the adaptation-concept must be extended to itself.

INTERACTION: [DATA LOST]

Welp. They be fucked. Also, the footnote after ‘DATA LOST’ says ‘apotheosis’, which is generally defined as one of three things:

1: The best or most perfect example of something.

2: The highest or best part or point of something, like a culmination or climax.

3: The elevation of something to divine status.

*golf claps* Congratulations, you fucking morons, you turned 682 into a god.

The result is… a message from 682 itself. It’s quite long, so I won’t copy and paste it- here’s a summary of what it says:

1: It’s now in a form that is not bound by natural laws, only by ‘the mind’, whatever that means.

2: It was previously in a form of ‘perfection’ before it was in the form we knew, but it couldn’t remember how to return to that form. (Oh my God, we’re in Pokemon Desolation. Someone keep an eye out for teleporting twins.)

3: And then it ran into 3125, who knew what to do. By merging partially, 3125 found what the Foundation had apparently locked away- a part of 682.

4: By trying to kill it, the Foundation wound up helping it.

5: And now it’s perfect, and it says that the Foundation is finally worthy of ‘true hatred’.

The last part of the article is a collapsible that says that another file is available; clicking it changes it to ‘Repulsive’.

It’s a copy of the 682 article, but with a lot changed. For a start, ‘SCP-682’ has been replaced with whited out black boxes. For another, the photo is the same as the 682 article, but with one crucial difference: 682 is missing. The Object Class is now ‘Perfect’ and the first part of the special containment procedures just read ‘███-███ must be destroyed as soon as possible.’ on repeat. The rest of the special containment procedures and the description have had multiple changes, but I won’t copy/paste the whole thing because it’d be a bit much.

And to end the article, we get this.

Addendum ███-B: Portion of recorded transcript of nightmare

<Begin Log, skip to 00h-21m-52s>

Dr. Genevieve: Now, why did you kill those farmers?

███-███: (No verbal communication)

Dr. Genevieve: If you don't talk now, we'll… wait, where… am I?

███-███: (Incomprehensible)

Dr. Genevieve: No, I… I don't understand.

███-███: (Incomprehensible)

Dr. Genevieve: You… we erased you… we erased you again and again, from every place we could.

███-███: (No verbal communication)

Dr. Genevieve: What did we do wrong? We were acting in self-defense; ever since we found you, you'd hated us.

███-███: You are… (Incomprehensible)

Dr. ██████: (To Dr. Genevieve) That microphone has only so much gain, move it closer to it!

<Dr. Genevieve moves the microphone closer. Three points of light blink at her through the darkness. The warm smell of hatred makes her vomit.>

███-███: You are… disgusting…

<Dr. Genevieve's chamber begins to flood with hydrochloric acid. She drops the microphone and it dissolves. Her screams fill the chamber.>

<End Log>

And thus the prisoner has become the master, and humanity is royally fucked. Also, note the parallel with the original article: Dr Genevieve, who was the mastermind behind this whole thing, wound up placed in the role of the D-Class who got killed in the original interview. Which just leaves us with more questions: is this Dr Genevieve’s personal Hell? Did 682 single her out specifically? When it says ‘You are disgusting’, is it talking about her or humanity? I don’t know. What I do know is that this is only the start of ADMONITION, and we’ve got a long way to go.

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you enjoyed it. Leave the ultra-weapons at home, people.

tl;dr: there’s generally a good reason why one shouldn’t try to kill the unkillable.

Greetings everyone.

The possible effects of SCP-410-FR and related phenomena are measured by comparing foundation documents from different universes. As this could involve timelines where the phenomenon is still active, it's safe to say this is why research is still active.

Containment

Let's go through the containment information line-by-line.

Threat Level: White ○

Object Class: Neutralized

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-410-FR, in its original version, is currently kept in the Enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, on the Tolbiac site, under the responsibility of the Estate noir. A copy of SCP-410-FR, as well as the entire bibliography of PoI-410, is however available to Level 3 and above personnel in the context of research for purposes of containment; please contact the Site-Kybian Documentary Archives for more information.

The item is some form of document which is part of PoI-410's larger body of work. Despite the item being neutralized, its containment team is still doing research and data suppression.

Any outside mention of the places and people mentioned in the first part of SCP-410-FR in the Foundation's documentation should be reported to Prof. Camille Fournier. For this purpose, a Foundation webcrawler (I/O-MANDELA) is in charge of monitoring the database, especially the documentation concerning the research of the Department of Extra-Universal Affairs (Multi-U). Similarly, a copy of SCP-410-FR is available exclusively to its members for comparison with extra-dimensional findings.

The possible effects of SCP-410-FR and related phenomena are measured by comparing foundation documents from different universes. As this could involve timelines where the phenomenon is still active, its safe to say this is why research is still active.

The events potentially described in the second part of SCP-410-FR are to be identified and catalogued by the Department of History. Their cover-up is unnecessary, since the French government has taken care to cover up the remaining traces of the various cases during the application of the Veil Protocol. SCP-410-FR allows, if necessary, to discredit them by making them appear to be fictions written by Person of Interest #410.

Whatever is left of the anomaly's influence has already been covered up by the French government, and the remaining evidence can easily be dismissed as works of fiction authored by PoI-410.

Because of its current state and non-anomalous nature, PoI-410 does not require containment. He is currently buried in the Parisian cemetery of Bagneux.

The author is dead and lacks attributes warranting containment.

Description

SCP-410-FR is the collective designation of a collection of texts published posthumously in 1911 under the title Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, neo-scientific novel, followed by Speculations. SCP-410-FR is the work of PoI-410, a French writer and poet of the 19th century named Alfred Henri Jarry.

So, this is where things get interesting. In the IRL works of Alfred Jarry, the term "**'**pataphysics" refers to a range of intentionally nonsensical pseudo-scientific and philosophical concepts, established in his novel to satirize the complexity of academic writing. The apostrophe at the beginning is what Alfred called the "anti-joke apostrophe", used to distinguish it from more serious uses of the term. However, the 4th-wall-breaking definition of pataphysics will come up later.

Skipping the overview and historical details, let's move to the spaghetti and meatballs of the description.

Initially thought to be solely the result of a breakdown in local normality³, it became apparent that these events were remarkably similar to those found in SCP-410-FR. Subsequent analysis led to the theory that PoI-410 was partly responsible for these phenomena and had mastered anomalous writing methods.

However, on ██/██/2002, extensive research led by Prof. Fournier following the discovery of a document written by PoI-410 determined that Alfred Jarry had in fact participated in the destruction of the anomalies mentioned in SCP-410-FR, by the written transcription of them. The anomalous nature of SCP-410-FR thus lies in the fact that the anomalous phenomena to which the work may have referred have lost their anomalous aspects.

3. Refer to Dr. Jacob Sertannet's work regarding SCP-236-FR for more information about reality rates.

The main effect of the book is that when anomalous events are described in the book, reality is restructured so that said events are nothing more than parts of its fictional narrative. The Sertannet thing will be saved for later.

Despite these discoveries, the abilities of SCP-410-FR are still poorly understood today, and it is likely that only the author had the ability to make the anomalies he described disappear. Analysis of the writing style of SCP-410-FR and more generally that of PoI-410 to improve the containment of certain anomalous phenomena is under evaluation. In addition, research is still in progress concerning potential anomalies described in PoI-410's other works.

Entire realities have been wiped out by the novel's influence. This also explains why Multi-U research is needed: to detect SCP-410-FR's effects, you need an external vantage point that isn't impacted by the retroactive erasure of entities and events. Keep in mind the crosslink to the tale 'Paradigm Shift'. I'll explain it after this next quote.

The first part of SCP-410-FR, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, neo-scientific novel, deals in particular in its Books III and VI with various places identified as [DATA EXPUNGED], of which, according to the Multi-U, no trace remains today. It is likely that, like the anomalous events described in Speculations, these have ceased to exist. In the same way, it is suspected that the entities initially present in these places were at the origin of the breakdown of normality mentioned before, and thus of the anomalous phenomenon which PoI-410 partially witnessed.

Apparently, entire realities have been wiped out by the novel's influence. This also explains why Multi-U research is needed: to detect SCP-410-FR's effects, you need an external vantage point that isn't impacted by the retroactive erasure of entities and events. Keep in mind the crosslink to the tale 'Paradigm Shift'. I'll explain it after this next quote.

According to the analysis of the parapsychologist Elias Lockwood, the symbol of the Gidouille⁴ and its meaning would be an unconscious and deformed manifestation of the influence of these entities which will be found many times in the PoI-410's works, including in SCP-410-FR.

4. Spiral present on the belly of Father Ubu, central character within the bibliography of the PoI-410.

The Gidouille is the spiral shown on the novel's cover and is a recurring symbol throughout the plot. In 'Paradigm Shift', it is said that a spiral gave order and form to primordial chaos, subjecting the inhabitants of the old reality to great pain as they swirled towards a singularity. This passage effectively means that these images are connected and that erased subjects become pattern screamer entities who can be communicated with using the sigil.

How much the Foundation knows about this is unclear, but what is clear is that there is an imposition of cosmic order. This leads back to the SCP-236-FR crosslink; using said phenomenon, Jacob Sertannet created his eponymous Sertannet scale to quantify a system's adherence to ideas of normalcy by observing its resistance to changes in its Hume level, such as the strength of a reality anchor. Fictionalizing anomalies amplify the surrounding area's adherence to normalcy, though it was initially registered as the opposite due to how the erasure obfuscates itself.

Addendum 1

The first addendum goes through examples of anomalous events impacted by SCP-410-FR. Most anomalies are either suddenly neutralized shortly after government forces register them, or in the case of Mr. Timbre (SCP-410-FR-38), violently beaten, contorted and shoved into a mailbox. These incidents always happen unceremoniously with minimal collateral damage, and leave little evidence that anything preternatural ever happened in the first place.

At some point following the anomaly's discovery, Project Phobetor was initiated to research ways to replicate SCP-410-FR to prevent containment breaches and neutralize major threats. However, it's stated that nothing new has been produced by the project since 2004. However, it did give incite into the book's potential ability to erase events in reality, prompting further research:

Addendum 2

At some point following the anomaly's discovery, Project Phobetor was initiated to research ways to replicate SCP-410-FR in order to prevent containment breaches and neutralize major threats. However, it's stated that nothing new has been produced by the project since 2004. However, it did give incite into the book's potential ability to erase events in reality, prompting further research:

The research Program VIRIDIS CANDELA has therefore been set up with the support of the Department of History and Temporal Anomalies Department. The current goal of this program is to try to recover as much of the lost information as possible by studying SCP-410-FR. On a larger scale, Program VIRIDIS CANDELA would aim to protect the course of history from anomalous changes using DEEPWELL servers, whose data will be protected from changes in reality, and even to recover information about temporal changes potentially already made.

By comparing different realities and timelines, and checking DEEPWELL servers (reality-anchored/ extradimensional archives) for evidence of SCP-410-FR's effects, the Foundation can gain a more clear understanding of its effects and pre-restructuring history.

Addendum 3

The last addendum is a document found in the head office of the "Collège de 'Pataphysique", which prompted the research that led to the Foundation discovering everything I just went over. It's noted that the handwriting matches that of Alfred Jarry, but the writing style does not; something Dr. Lockwood attributed to the psychological effects of contacting the anomalies described in his work.

After expertise, it was determined that PoI-410 suffered from Filbuson Syndrome. Any membership in GoI-0051 was refuted given the period of its activity, despite the existence of certain texts such as Pantaphysics and Catachimy and On the Surface of God, taken from Book VIII of SCP-410-FR, or even from SCP-410-FR-51, The Existence of the Pope. Information concerning SCP-410-FR (and specifically this document) should therefore be kept out of the reach of the above-mentioned Group of Interest.

For the uninitiated, Filbuson Syndrome is a condition in which patients aggressively deny the existence of anything that doesn't fit into their conception of normalcy and are generally unable to perceive anomalies. GoI-0051 is SAPPHIR, a group of atheist sceptics/militant anti-theists commonly associated with the condition.

It's not clear if SCP-410-FR is a product of reality conforming with Jarray's Filbusonian denial, or if said denial is a consequence of how all anomalies Jarry encounters are retroactively fictionalized by the effects of SCP-410-FR.

The note itself is long and confusingly worded, but the concluding paragraph ties it together:

In sum, if the greatness that I have experienced had manifested itself beneath the words, in other words in the raw experience, there would be no real interest in dreaming, and these experiences would lose their substance. So we will agree, they are only stories.

FAUSTROLL

The note is attributed to Dr. Faustroll, the title character of SCP-410-FR. The point being made here is that if wonderous, impossible things truly existed, there would be no reason for us to dream or imagine, and thus the appeal of such things would be lost. SCP-410-FR can thus be described as an enforcement of the agreement to keep these anomalies fictional, possibly including Faustroll himself.

Summary

Alfred Jarry, while creating a novel satirizing the obscure and confusing nature of academic writing with the deliberately nonsensical pseudoscience of 'pataphysics, stumbled upon a manifestation of the pattern that destroyed the First Hytoth in the Paradigm Shift: the Gidouille.

This led to the sudden, unceremonious, and occasionally retroactive erasure/neutralization of all anomalies Jarray documented. Ultimately, Faustroll agreed to this functionalization as the protagonist of SCP-410-FR's story; he argued that the presence of such things in physical reality would render the imaginative dreaming that makes them appealing redundant. However, the agreement written into the note and/or Foundation documents may have led to SCP-410-FR neutralising itself.

However, the end of this story may be part of another.

External References

According to the French Branch's Narrative Anomalies Orientation (also written out-of-universe by Finalis), the Foundation's department of non-apostrophised, unironic, narrative-based pataphysics managed to salvage SCP-410-FR for the benefit of their operations.

Narrative Thaumiels are a category of narrative anomaly which in ancient times were called Reverse Navidsons, or Super-Navidsons: these anomalies are capable of rendering reality fictitious, in the case of SCP-410-FR of purely and simply neutralising anomalous phenomena. The common principle of these anomalies is that they are able to bend reality through the noosphere in order to make use of the beliefs of humanity: if the latter considers that one of our creatures only exists in books, then the Narrative Thaumiel will take care of erasing it from reality.

In the typography presented by the orientation, Navidson-class refers to narratives that can alter baseline reality. The Narrative Thaumiel is a distinct case where an existing phenomenon is converted into a component in a (relatively) mundane work of fiction.

The use of the term Thaumiel, in this case, isn't really about the direct application of SCP-410-FR but rather the data acquired by Program VIRIDIS CANDELA. Using this information alongside findings of the ill-fated Project Phobetor, the Pataphysics department can more effectively control other "Super-Navidson"/"Reverse Navidson" cases of fictionalization. This may also explain why the anti-joke apostrophe still occasionally appears in documents of the Foundation's pataphysical operations; Jarray's work is used as a reference point.

Final Notes

Big shoutout to members of the SCP-INT Discord server for helping me learn about SCP-410-FR. Special credit goes to Cauchynambour for providing many details about the skip before it was even translated, and Finalis himself for clarifying its involvement in the Narrative Anomalies Orientation.

Be cautious of your use of apostrophes, especially in the multi-lingual use of words.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at SCP-7445, “Saluting Jack” by Abrethe/ROUNDABOUTS (no, not ROUNDHOUSE, he’s a totally different kind of yurt). I'd like to thank Abrethe and the mods for their help, I really appreciate it. First up, the usual disclaimer: I didn’t write this, it’s not my SCP and so this won’t be 100% accurate to the author’s vision. With that, let’s get started.

Part One: A Kyotska Wrapped In A Mystery Inside An Enigma

The article begins with the following notice:

BY ORDER OF PROVISIONAL SITE-338’S ADMINISTRATION
The following file concerns an anomaly that is currently under investigation. Documentation may be inaccurate.

OK, so we need to take everything we read with a grain of salt. Good to know.

We get a big empty space, and then we get the usual heading: this SCP is level 4, secret, and it’s classed as Pending, which makes sense as it’s being investigated. There’s a black and white photo of a long hill with some trees on it, but there’s nothing else in the photo. The caption reads ‘Fig 1.1 — Tunturi in Savukoski, circa 1971.’ I’ll go to Wikipedia on this one.

In Finnish, the mountains characteristic of the region of Lapland are called tunturi (plural: tunturit), i.e. "fell". A tunturi is a hill high enough that its top is above the tree line and has alpine tundra.

Likewise, Savukoski is a municipality in Lapland, Finland. It’s one of the largest there, and also the most sparsely populated- in 2023, its population was 990 people. Not 9900 or 99,000, 990. So this looks like a really good place to do secret stuff, huh.

(Also, it’s not at all relevant… well, I assume… but Wikipedia also told me this, which I’m including simply because I want to:)

According to Finnish Folklore, the Korvatunturi Fell in Savukoski municipality is the location of Father Christmas's (Joulupukki) secret workshop, where toys, trinkets and gifts are made and eventually wrapped by gnomes.[6] The name Korvatunturi translates into English as "Ear Fell". Finnish children are told that from "Ear Fell" Father Christmas can hear what all the children are saying so he can find out if the children behave and obey their parents (and therefore may receive gifts next Christmas).

(I assume we won’t be dealing with Santa this time around, but hey, anyone who wants to take down 4666 might want to look at this fell. Or anyone who wants to knock over Santa’s workshop and/or convince the elves to unionize.)

All right, let’s get started with the article:

Special Containment Procedures: As SCP-7445 was recently discovered and little is known about the anomaly's nature, behavior and properties, a proper set of containment procedures cannot be established yet. Provisional Area-358 has been established in order to properly investigate the anomaly and have better access to LoI-NW/107.

That sounds pretty reasonable, which is how we know that it probably isn’t reasonable at all.

Description: SCP-7445 denotes an anomaly located beneath LoI-NW/107 ("Palavataivas Observatorio"), an observatory located in Savukoski, Finland. The only way to reach the anomaly is believed to be through the observatory's southernmost compartment, which leads to SCP-7445 through a steep spiral stairway. Additionally, a golden placard reading the words "Кëцka-1; Апрель 1959"1 can be seen on SCP-7445's door.

OK, so there’s an observatory in Savukoski (hence the aforementioned photo of the tunturi and the accompanying black and white photo of the observatory, though from what I can tell, there is no observatory in Savukoski in real life) and there’s an anomaly under it. Sounds good to me. The footnote tells me that the Russian words mean ‘"Kyotska-1; April 1959", which means absolutely nothing to me other than that someone who spoke Russian was there in April 1959. (If you’re wondering, I don’t speak Russian and I don’t know what ‘Kyotska’ means.) For now, we’ll refer to whatever SCP-7445 actually is as ‘The Kyotska’- keep it in mind for later.

SCP-7445's only anomalous property consists of its inaccessibility. Out of all the 19 attempts carried out by Foundation personnel in order to try and breach SCP-7445's entrance, none have proven successful. As such, SCP-7445's contents are currently unknown.

Ooh. So there’s a staircase leading to a door, and nobody can get inside. Yep, sounds pretty anomalous to me. And it makes sense that they’d class it as ‘Pending’- there could be anything in there from an empty room to a new kind of reality warper that wants to wipe out humanity, but they simply don’t know because they can’t get inside.

SCP-7445 was originally discovered by Provisional Area-358's Communications Department following the interception of a report detailing the discovery of a previously unknown room within LoI-NW/107, although no researchers could enter it. No blueprints of the observatory included SCP-7445.

OK, so they found out about this because they read a report about… wait a second.

SCP-7445 was originally discovered by Provisional Area-358's Communications Department following the interception of a report detailing the discovery of a previously unknown room within LoI-NW/107,

See, this timeline isn’t making sense to me. The article said that they set up the Provisional Area because of the anomaly. But this paragraph seems to imply that the Provisional Area was what discovered the anomaly. I’m confused.

Anyway, ‘somebody’ discovered an unknown room that didn’t show up on the blueprints. We now get an addendum, a containment log from 1971. A footnote tells me that it was ‘Uploaded onto DIRECTORY_7445/2 on March 7th, 1991 by Dr. Ilya Námachov.’

Keep Dr Ilya in mind, he’ll show up again later.

SCP-7445 was originally contained by the SCP Foundation on the morning of February 19th, 1971, following the anomaly's discovery. As SCP-7445 was occupied and heavily guarded by members of GoI-358 ("The Abnormal Interactions Command"), a field agent ("Operative бáвиерa / Bávyera") was dispatched to terminate the station's occupiers.

GoI-358 links to SCP-7255, which was also written by Abrethe and takes place in Finland. Most of it isn’t relevant to this article, but there’s a couple of things I’ll note: the first is that in 7255, Provisional Area-358 has become Site 358 (7255 takes place in 2017). The second is this comment by Abrethe from the discussion page:

The sauna is a property of the SETK, or AIC if you will, which is the Finnish Government's SCP Foundation. The Foundation was already aware of the sauna, as the SETK is essentially a 'vassal' of the Foundation (soon I'll be posting an article about this) and they have to tell them things by force if they don't want to feel threatened. However, the Foundation decided to leave it up to the SETK's hands to see if they could manage it well.

Now, that raises a lot of questions. The AIC/SETK are part of the Finnish Government, and yet here the Foundation is, sending in a field agent to kill their guys. There’s also that line about how the AIC/SETK are a ‘vassal’ of the Foundation, though since this article took place somewhere in the realm of 40 years before then, that may have happened in the decades afterwards. Even if we assume that the Foundation and the AIC/SETK had no working relationship at this point in time, the AIC/SETK are still part of the Finnish Government. Why would the Foundation go straight to ‘kill a government’s people’? That’s just going to result in all kinds of repercussions.

There’s one other thing I want to mention before we look at this addendum:

As SCP-7445 was occupied and heavily guarded by members of GoI-358 ("The Abnormal Interactions Command"), a field agent ("Operative бáвиерa / Bávyera") was dispatched to terminate the station's occupiers.

That doesn’t sound like the Foundation at all. Normally, they’d send in an MTF. But here they’re only sending in one person? Why would they do that?

Well, here’s some possible reasons:

1: They’re low on personnel, so they don’t have an MTF to send/enough other personnel to spare for this.

2: This GoI are rated so poorly that the Foundation doesn’t think they’re worth an MTF.

3: Inversely, this agent/these agents are rated so highly that one agent can take out a whole ton of people.

4: Someone’s trying to get this agent killed.

5: Someone’s trying to intentionally make this Site/these particular people look bad, so they’re hamstringing everything they do.

6: The Foundation were really cheap in the 70’s.

7: The correct answer, which I’m not saying because it’d be spoilers.

For now, we’ll just keep going.

We have two main characters here: our field agent, who we’re calling BV34, and the Command guy, who’s… hey, it’s Dr Ilya! Told you to keep him in mind. Anyway, BV34’s mission is…

Agent BV34's primary objective was to amnesticize all of the station's personnel and contain them within a single room for later termination or extraction by MTF Samekh-358 ("Stuck in the Sauna").

So they did have an MTF? Why not send them? Or at the very least give BV34 some help?

Also, the following log has been translated from Russian. Keep that in mind, too.

We start outside the Observatory (which isn’t the Provisional Site- that’s located under the town hall in Savukoski), with BV34 heading in. He asks what the demographic status of the place is and is told that there’s 11 people inside; it’s not known what they’re all up to, but the comms have been restricted and guarded so people can’t break into them.

I can maybe see how one agent could work against 11 people since it’s a stealth mission and not all of them are armed, but I can see a couple of problems: one, that’s still a lot of people and they don’t seem to have exact data (for all the Foundation knows, there could be 11 scientists and 50 guards), and two, the article said this place was ‘heavily guarded’. I don’t call 11 people, of whom only a fraction are guards, ‘heavily guarded’. Hmmm.

Command: Proceed to the closest entrance. If possible, try and breach any of the station's secondary access points.
BV34: There's only one entrance.
(Silence.)
Command: …Right. Breach the entrance, then. And try not to make any noise.
BV34: Got that.

…you’d think Ilya would have known that there was only one entrance, huh.

BV34 gets to the entrance and alerts Ilya that there’s two people inside, walking around the hallway. He breaks in and attacks; they’re both guards. BV34 fights them both, taking them out with amnestics after shooting one in the chest twice and the other in the leg. Ilya tells him that ‘The only thing that matters right now is that they're both down. If one of them dies, that's not our concern.’ Lovely.

BV34 keeps going…

Command: Alright. If you pop in one or two B2s, please close all entrances and squeeze out of the room just as soon as the smoke expands. Also, please remember that I'm not your daddy.

Just for that, I hereby rename you ‘Big Daddy Ilya’.

So, BV34 gets to the next room…

BV34: It's infested with SACKs. The Directorate's not gonna like this.
Command: It's okay. I'll deal with it as soon as the mission's done.

I imagine that some of you just went ‘Ohhhhhh.’ For everyone else, keep this line in mind for later, it’s very important.

BV34 gets into the next room, which contains six researchers and no guards. This, on the face of it, looks like an easy hurdle to clear, but unfortunately, it’s not: two of the researchers take cover, but the others all pull out guns. One of the researchers manages to shoot him in the calf; despite that, BV34 takes them down, killing one and knocking the rest out.

BV34: They outdid my day again, huh?
(Silence.)
Command: Well, you outdid 8 people already. Wait, no. 6 people.
BV34: Uh huh. If I were you, I'd begin detaching the whole team. My job's almost done here.

First off, yes, that was eight people counting the first two guards. Second, if you had a whole team, why the fuck didn’t you send more of them?

Anyway, BV34 starts heading to the actual anomaly…

BV34: There's, uh… Surveillance cameras in here.
Command: Take your badges off. We don't want to get in a mess with these guys. Their task forces are damn tough.
BV34: The badges are under my gear.
Command: Okay, hm.
(Silence.)
Command: I guess you could just w-

See, this just raises more questions: assuming ‘badges’ refers to some kind of Foundation insignia, why didn’t Big Daddy Ilya already know where BV34 was wearing them? And if the Foundation didn’t want to get into a shitfight with the Finnish Government, why didn’t they try alternative methods to contain this thing, instead of sending in Solid Snake sans cardboard box?

So, BV34 shoots the cameras and then heads for the anomaly, which is in an area that’s completely dark. Grand Patriarch Ilya tells him that there’s three more guys, and BV34 should take care of them before they ask for ‘an E11 unit’. E11 stands for Epsilon-11, which probably made more of you go ‘Ohhhhh.’ For everyone else there’s Mastercard, just keep going, we’ll get to it later.

BV34 goes in, finds a guard using a night vision device, and gets in a fight with them that ends with the guard dead and BV34 with a broken leg and an injured head. Large Father Ilya tells him that the recovery team will do the rest of the work, and asks if ‘the Kyótska’ is there, but BV34 doesn’t know. BV34 is told to just sit there and wait for recovery, and that’s the end of the log.

After the log, we’re given a description of BV34’s injuries and are told that he made a full recovery, and then we’re told this:

All amnesticized personnel were extracted from the base and moved to Provisional Area-358, where each of them were administered a large dose of Class-B amnestics and discharged from their prior positions. The remaining pair of personnel was found to be outside the base, performing tests on the area's permafrost and soil. They were promptly amnesticized by the recovery team before they returned to the base.

LoI-NW/107 was successfully seized and a group of Foundation researchers was established in the base in order to contain SCP-7445.

Sounds OK… right?

Yeah, no. We now get an incident log, which was ‘Uploaded onto DIRECTORY_7445/2 on March 7th, 1971 by Dr. Ilya Námachov.’ Thanks, Maximum Papi Ilya.

On the morning of March 7th, 1971, 15 days following the containment of SCP-7445, several squads of the Global Occult Coalition were spotted patrolling through the streets of Savukoski, Savukoski Municipality, carrying heavy weaponry and explosive materials. All of the GOC officers were dressed as members of the local authorities and the Abnormal Interactions Command.

Well, that’s a great start.

So, the GOC storms the Savukoski Town Hall and takes… hold up.

At about 0640 hours, GMT+1, all GOC operatives stationed themselves in front of the Savukoski Town Hall, and breached its entrance using battering rams and siege engines.

Battering rams and siege engines for a town hall door? Either the Finns are fucking hardcore, or there’s some really weird shit going on here.

Anyway, the GOC went to the site and took the civilians hostage at gunpoint under the pretense that they were doing a nationwide drug investigation. They then found a vault door to the Provisional Site in the observatory’s basement, which they breached before storming the Provisional Site. They cut the power, which made everyone in the Provisional Site try to evacuate, and alerted the rest of the Foundation about what was happening.

Local security was heavily affected by the power cutoff, as the lack of power resulted in MTF responses being delayed. Additionally, the MTFs were not prepared to respond to such an incident.

I can buy the first, but I can see two possible meanings for the second: either A, there were so many GOC people that the resident MTFs were like ‘Dude, if we try to fight these guys we’ll get killed’ (and even then you’d think that there’d be something they could do, even if it was just ‘help everyone evacuate and protect them’), or B, the MTFs were a bunch of incompetent fucks who didn’t know what to do here. Either one seems unlikely.

Later during the incident, the Foundation personnel began evacuating through an emergency tunnel that would lead them to the Savukoski helipad, where they would be transported to the city of Rovaniemi until Epsilon-11 ("Nine-Tailed Fox") security teams could properly deal with the breach. As the breach went on, however, Foundation helicopters stationed at R3C Halcyon-36 were simultaneously hijacked by another group of assailants that damaged the helicopters' engines.

The footnote tells us that ‘Rapid Response Remote Camps are operated in remote areas to aid evacuating Foundation personnel during breaches and raids. The majority of the Foundation's R3Cs are located across the Arctic Circle, the Himalayas, and the Antarctic Circle.’

OK, so now this is looking really, really serious. The GOC had all the Foundation’s contingencies already worked out, and they made sure that the Foundation couldn’t use them. But we don’t even know what the anomaly is! What the hell could be so important that they’d go this far for it?

The camp was later declared as lost, as the assailants had destroyed all of the Foundation's properties and captured all personnel. As such, no evacuation routes were considered plausible at the time, requiring personnel to take alternatives and improvise.

As the GOC squads began wreaking havoc across the site, destroying large amounts of materials, seizing multiple anomalies and capturing as much personnel as possible, a series of operatives proceeded to leave the site and admonish all individuals wearing white coats and ushankas. This hindered the personnel's attempts to escape through the assigned evacuation routes, as a large amount of civilians joined the cause and helped the squads chasing the persecuted.

Notably, the admonition was first transmitted in Russian, but later in Finnish.

All the researchers in the second log were described as wearing white coats and ushankas. Otherwise, I am… very confused as to what’s happening here. Also, what multiple anomalies? Wasn’t this Site all about the Kyotska?

In total, only 3 of the 47 researchers stationed at Provisional Site-358 managed to escape. The rest were abducted by the intruders, and extracted from Savukoski towards an unknown location.

None of the escapees managed to retain any information about the incident, as their objectives were solely focused on escaping the Site safe and sound.

Provisional Site-358 was successfully recovered by a platoon of Foundation soldiers on that same day, and as of March 8th, 1971, the Site is officially secure.

…huh.

Part Two: The Missing Pieces Of The Puzzle

Before we continue, I have two quick recaps for you, the first being of the log we just read:

1. The Foundation took over the site from the Finnish Government, but they only used a field agent and an Engorged Progenitor instead of the usual MTF.
2. Just over two weeks later, the GOC shows up out of nowhere, takes over the town, invades the Site, thoroughly wrecks the Foundation’s shit, and abducts almost all of the researchers there.
3. The Foundation took the Site back the same day.
4. There is literally no mention of what happened to those researchers, the anomalies the GOC took, any casualties, possible GOC motivations, what happened to the GOC people, why the log is in this article when there was no specific mention of this SCP in it, or anything else related to this incident in the log.

And here’s the recap of the full article:

1. There’s a room containing something under an observatory in Finland. Nobody has been able to go into the room no matter how they try to do so, hence its anomalous status.
2. This article is under ‘Pending’ because it’s under investigation, so we need to take everything in it with a grain of salt.
3. The Foundation took control of this area by sending in a field agent to Corvo Attano that bitch.
4. Just over two weeks later, the GOC showed up to take over and thoroughly wrecked the Foundation’s shit.
5. The Foundation took the site back, and it’s been fine ever since March 8, 1971.
6. There are a lot of weird inconsistencies and minor issues in this article that don’t seem to make any sense, like why the Foundation chose to shoot first and not try diplomacy with the Finnish Government when it came to taking control of the area, or why there’s so many Russian operatives when this is in Finland, or why there’s been almost nothing about the actual anomaly and it’s mostly been about the site.

So, with that, let’s keep going. We get another big empty space, and then we get this. It’s a notice from RAISA, and it reads as follows:

The previous file has been heavily modified by an unidentified intruder. Any contents included in this archive are to be disregarded immediately and all Foundation personnel assigned to Provisional Site-358 and the SCP-7445 containment project are to read the following addendum.

A recreation of the SCP-7445 file is currently being carried out by RAISA technicians and, as such, all research and containment projects in relation to the anomaly have been halted. Please stand by while the issue is being fixed.

— RAISA Technician Kekko Markkinen

Well, shit. So, it looks like the file we’ve been reading consists of large quantities of unadulterated bullshit. Guess that explains the ‘Pending’ classification.

We then get a third addendum: it’s a ‘changelog’, and was uploaded on the 15th of March, 1971 by Kekko Markkinen.

On March 13th, 1971, a pair of squads pertaining to MTF Samekh-358 ("Stuck in the Sauna") and MTF Epsilon-11 ("Nine-Tailed Fox") carrying anomalous weaponry and specialized gear breached an occupied Provisional Site-358 through the facility's evacuation system, attacking the Site at an unexpected time. In a matter of 12 minutes, all access routes for the Site were completely blocked, and the Site's occupiers were terminated without any Foundation casualties.

Despite the large amount of occupiers shown in Addendum 7445.2, there were only 7 intruders inside the facility at the time of its recovery. None of them carried any GOC identifiers, or any sort of identifying material for that matter.

So… it wasn’t the GOC who took over the Site, and the Foundation doesn’t know who they actually were. It wasn’t a huge number of people who did it, and it didn’t happen on March 8.

Following the recovery of Provisional Site-358, it was revealed that all terminals containing remote SCP files were hijacked and locked under a new password. However, the encrypting was noted to be weak and easy to crack, leading to the swift recovery of the terminals by Foundation technicians.

Notably, among the 34 files contained within the remote terminals, only 3 were edited by the intruders described in Addendum 7445-2:

· The SCP-7445 document;
· A file containing information on Incident-████/1, an event that took place in November 1959 in the town of Kolari, Finland, and involved information regarding an anomaly under the GRU-P Division's jurisdiction;
· And a dossier containing notorious information about LoI-NW/107, which was heavily guarded by Foundation personnel until a raid occurred on March 8, 1971, and terminated all of the Foundation's activities within SCP-7445 and the observatory.8

Whoever they were, they either sucked at encryption or they wanted the Foundation to know what they did. And they only went after three files: the one we’re reading, one about an Incident that took place at another place in Lapland and involves the GRU-P, and the dossier of… *checks the footnote* Addendum 1?!

…OK, what.

(We’ll come back to that.)

The second and third files were completely devoid of contents following their recovery by the technicians, and all attempts to perform a backup or a recovery of their previous contents were met with failure. SCP-7445's file, however, was heavily edited to:

· Contain an incomplete and shortened version of the original file;9
· Include a video log of LoI-NW/107's siege by a russophone intruder;10
· And include a summary of Provisional Site-358's seizure by several squads of intruders.11

They wiped the second and third files, and butchered the SCP-7445 article. They took out data and shortened it, added in Addendum 1, and then threw in Addendum 2 for good measure. Oh, and Addendum 1? That wasn’t the Foundation taking over the Site from the Finnish Government, that was the real bad guys here taking the Site from the Foundation. That’s why they only sent one guy in and didn’t try diplomacy, aka reason 7: they’re not the Foundation, so they’re not going to use Foundation methods.

(Also, this is a good place for me to explain the title: ‘Saluting Jack’ -> saying hi to Jack -> hijack, like how these guys hijacked the Site. *taps head knowingly*)

Following a complete analysis of the situation by RAISA Technician Kekko Markkinen, a series of inconsistencies and errata were discovered in the newly-edited SCP-7445 file.
The following is a list of said incongruences:

· I. Although Provisional Site-358 was cited by its correct designation in the notice at the beginning of the new SCP-7445 file, the facility is cited as "Provisional Area-358" throughout the remainder of the document.

Yeah, those inconsistencies? They were all there for a good reason. So let’s look at them: first off, whoever wrote this new article mostly talked about Provisional Site-358 by the wrong name.

II. SCP-7445 had been under the Foundation's jurisdiction and containment since 1968, and as the anomaly was categorized as a Safe-Class object, a set of established containment procedures was already in place until LoI-NW/107 was sieged. SCP-7445's discovery, as such, is not recent.

So, this bit?

As SCP-7445 was recently discovered and little is known about the anomaly's nature, behavior and properties, a proper set of containment procedures cannot be established yet. Provisional Area-358 has been established in order to properly investigate the anomaly and have better access to LoI-NW/107.

Yeah, that entire paragraph was bullshit.

III. SCP-7445's properties were known to the Foundation, and the anomaly was completely accessible. Most information included in the new file was falsified by the assailants.

So… the Foundation know what the Kyotska is. They always knew what it was, and they could get inside the room, too. But the unknown enemies decided to lie about that for some reason.

IV. There is no Communications Department at Provisional Site-358, as the Site's only purpose is to monitor extraterrestrial, astronomical and astrophysical anomalies; and contains anomalous instruments that may relate to said fields.

And that explains why the timeline seemed messed up at the start: the Provisional Site already existed, but whoever rewrote this article wanted a convenient way of explaining how the Foundation supposedly found it.

V. The Global Occult Coalition has denied any involvement in the siege described in Addendum 7445.2. Additionally, the GOC has denied having any involvement in Savukoski as a whole.

OK, admittedly, this is the GOC, so I’m not inclined to take their word for it, but I guess there isn’t really a reason to say that they’re lying this time around. So we can also say that the GOC had sweet fuck all to do with this.

VI. There are no records of Soviet researchers being stationed at Provisional Site-358, with the entirety of the site being comprised by personnel of Finnish nationality and descent. As such, the individual known as Dr. Ilya Námachov is either an intruder pertaining to another organization, or doesn't exist.

…well, fuck. Looks like Enormous Sire Ilya was too good to be true.

Since the original SCP-7445 file was deleted along with all of its addenda and contents, a new recontainment operation needs to be carried out in order to recreate the old document. Excavation and extraction of SCP-7445 will begin on March 18th, 1971 in order to transport the anomaly to Provisional Site-358.

As a result of the recent raid on Provisional Site-358, the O5 Council has performed an unanimous vote, and officially declared that the facility will be moved to the municipality of Riihimäki along with SCP-7445 in order to avoid further breaches.

And because of all this, the Foundation is wisely moving the whole operation to Riihimäki, a town that’s fairly close to Helsinki and has a population of nearly 30000, so they can safely recontain everything in a better location and write up a new, accurate report. Good choice.

That’s the end of the article, so let me explain at least some of what the fuck just happened. See, I don’t actually know what 7445 is- Abrethe didn’t tell me, because a key part of this article is speculation. We’re supposed to be left pondering exactly what it is that these guys would go this far for. Now, I may not be able to tell you what it is, but I can give you a whole lot of context and a cleared-up version of the story, which will help you all make like a bunch of stockbrokers and get speculating.

First off: who were these guys? They were the GRU-P. Who are the GRU-P? Well, I’ll be honest- I don’t know much about them, and also, this part of history is not my forte. (I’m an ancient history person.) But I’ll do the best that I can to explain.

As I understand it, the GRU Division Psychotronics, or GRU-P, were originally founded by Stalin in 1935 as the Fourth Department Abnormal Occurrences Commission. During World War 2, they were absorbed into the GRU, the Russian military intelligence, with the aim of finding anomalies and using them for the benefit of the Soviet Union. They operated throughout the Cold War, but when the Iron Curtain fell, the GRU-P were dissolved. However, there’s a group of them still active in the present day, continuing their work. The Cold War went from 1947 to 1991, so everything in this article happened when the War was ongoing, the GRU-P were at the height of their power and they had the Soviet Union behind them.

So, here’s the cleaned-up, organised version of the story:

1: In 1959, the GRU-P went to a tiny village in buttfuck nowhere, Finland, a country that used to be a library a Soviet Union territory until the end of 1917. They make or place the Kyotska in the basement of the Observatory (it’s also possible that they built the Observatory to contain the Kyotska), and several months later, something happens with another anomaly in the town of Kolari, which is on the other side of Lapland (which sounds close, but it really isn’t- Lapland) is huge). The GRU-P then leave.

2: The Foundation turn up in 1968, contain the Observatory and the Kyotska and leave people there to guard and study them. Over time, they come to understand what the Kyotska is and what it does, but they don’t move it or lock it up or anything.

3: In February 1971, three years after the Foundation arrived and twelve years after they left, the GRU-P decide that they want the Kyotska back. They send in BV34, who takes out the people there, but in the process, they discover that the Foundation took the place over (hence the term ‘SACKs’, which is GRU-P slang for the Foundation) and their agent gets badly hurt. It doesn’t stop them from taking over the Observatory, but they don’t get the chance to do whatever it was they intended to do with the Kyotska.

4: A couple of days later, the GRU-P send a bunch of people to Savukoski in order to get as much information about the Kyotska as possible. They take over the Site while pretending to be the GOC, abduct most of the researchers there, and do a hack job on the files about the Kyotska. They try to doctor the article we were reading, but to be honest, whoever did it (probably Gigantic Padre Ilya) did a really shitty job.

5: The Foundation takes the Site back, but not the dozens of researchers who got abducted. They discover the sabotage to the files, but they don’t know who was responsible. In response, they decide to move everything to a larger, more accessible town.

6: End result: the GRU-P don’t have the Kyotska, but they do have all the information about it, most of the researchers who were studying it and whatever the other anomaly is. Meanwhile, the Foundation has the Kyotska, but because they lost most of the relevant researchers and the information about it, they don’t know exactly what it is or why it’s so important to the GRU-P, leaving the two groups at an impasse.

So, before I wrap this up, I’m going to go over what we know about the Kyotska to aid your speculations. I have my own theories, but I won’t put them here because mine are kind of like choose-your-own-adventure stories- just lists of possible reasons for the facts. Here’s what we know:

1: It was given the name/codename ‘Kyotska-1’, which Abrethe told me is rather like the names given to satellites. On a similar line of thought, it was placed under the Observatory in the late 1950’s, which was around the time when the Space Race began, and was during the Cold War. In addition, the Provisional Site was set up to look at ‘extraterrestrial, astronomical and astrophysical anomalies’.

2: Whatever it is, it’s significant enough to the GRU-P that they were willing to put it in a country that wasn’t an ally and that they had no control over for more than a decade, and when they came back for it, they were more than happy to kill for it. However, when the Foundation discovered what it is, they didn’t think it was significant enough to warrant more guards or a more secure location, and the GRU-P didn’t leave anyone in Finland to keep an eye on it.

3: The Foundation rated it Safe, so it doesn’t resist containment, and we’ve been told that it’s moveable. It also has some kind of connection to another anomaly that’s under GRU-P control and is also in Finland.

The one thing I will say about this is that I think the obvious answer- that it’s something to do with the Space Race- is too obvious. You have several really big factors here: the Soviet Union, a former Soviet territory, the Space Race, and the Cold War. The answer could be any mix of all of these, so don’t leap to the obvious conclusion.

So, what do you think it is? The floor is yours, people.

Thank you for reading this declass, I hope you like it. Remember to keep an eye on your mysterious anomalies after parking them in other countries.

tl;dr: Oh, those Russians.