Technician Palmer yawned.
It was 0520, only 40 minutes until the end of his 6-hour shift. A shift spent in Monitoring Station Delta of Foundation Area-12, a shift that consisted of keeping watch over CCTV and audio feeds, checking monitors to ensure functional operation of vital systems, and occasionally serving as tech support for hapless researchers. So far, the past few hours had been relatively uneventful. The CCTV feeds showed contained SCP-objects behaving nominally, the audio feeds brought the sounds of late-night researchers soldiering on, and the monitors' data showed that all systems were functioning normally. It had been boring, certainly, but Goethe's Faust helped to alleviate the doldrum of it all. That is, when Palmer could sneak in a page or two. He knew reading on the job was highly improper, especially when such dangerous objects were under watch. But hell, it helped keep the eyes open better than the standard-issue caffeine pills could. And being awake and doing a bit of light reading was better than being asleep and totally unobservant.
He had just finished the first dialogue between The Lord and Mephistopheles when a red light began blinking on one of the monitors. Palmer looked up from the book and squinted at the screen. According to the data, a lighting unit had failed in a containment cell. When prompted, additional data appeared on the screen:
WARNING: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION
LOCATION: CONTAINMENT WING BETA, CELL 017
OBJECT CLASS: K
THREAT GRADE: ALPHA
CONTACT SUPERVISOR IMMEDIATELY.
Palmer's heart skipped a beat. Object Class K. Keter-Class. Those were the dangerous objects, the Alpha-priority entities. Area-12 had multiple such entities contained within it, but this was the first time he had seen a malfunction trigger an Alpha threat-grade. Prior to being stationed at Area-12, Palmer had worked as a Senior Technician at Sector-28, a low-threat containment facility on Vancouver Island. His reassignment to Area-12 had been a necessity, after an incident at Area-12 left several personnel…unable to continue in their duties. Palmer wasn't used to such a high degree of danger. Threat-Grade Alpha was terrifying. What Threat-Grade Alpha meant was that a system malfunction posed a real and present threat to the containment of an SCP-object, and that breach of said containment itself posed a significant threat to the facility or its personnel. Personnel that included himself.
Palmer wasted no time in contacting his supervisor. When the line connected, he was greeted with a tired voice.
"Sanders here, go ahead."
Palmer's voice shook as he spoke into the intercom. "Uh, sir, we have a system malfunction in Containment Wing Beta, Cell zero-one-seven. Appears to be a lighting unit failure."
Sanders' voice sounded slightly shaky as well. "Zero-one-seven? Keter-Class object?"
Palmer swallowed hard. "Affirmative."
There was a second of silence.
"Fuck. Alright, set THREATCON in Wing Beta to Omega and standby to initiate both lockdown and Protocol 305-Utah if necessary. I'm contacting the Response Team now. Good work, Palmer."
Palmer only hoped that his work would be worth it. He hit the button to put Wing Beta on THREATCON Omega and entered his access code to arm Protocol 305-Utah. Over the facility's loudspeakers, a klaxon sounded and an automated voice spoke a message.
"Warning. THREATCON in Containment Wing Beta has been set to Omega. All non-essential personnel please evacuate the area. This is not a drill. Repeat, THREATCON in Containment Wing Beta has been set to Omega. All non-essential personnel…"
Palmer prayed that the Response Team would be quick.

In a hall of Containment Wing Beta, Response Team Echo began setting up to deal with the crisis in Cell-017. A red warning light spun overhead, letting any and all personnel know that this area was on high alert. Armed guards kept watch at the entrances and exits to the hall, as well as by the doors of other containment cells. Several researchers and staff passed through, one swiping her card on a door's reader and going into a cell with a trolley filled with meat. Although it was essential to secure the area in the event of a containment breach, of equal importance was the proper containment of other objects in the vicinity. What utter irony it would be, for one containment breach to occur because the efforts of preventing a breach interfered with another object's containment! It was for this reason that Response Team Echo operated with optimum efficiency, maintaining the least presence necessary to complete their duties.
At present, Maintenance Technician Swinburne was in the process of suiting up, pulling a reflective bodysuit up his torso. A real live technician was required for this task; usually, lighting fixtures could be replaced from the back or sides, but SCP-017's containment cell was bordered on multiple sides by other SCP objects whose containment procedures left no available space for even a crawl-area. Standing by were backup technicians in the event that Swinburne was unable to complete the task appointed him. On the ground was a very large high-intensity arc lamp bulb, with three others in their packaging nearby. Also on site was a portable generator, to which were hooked up several standing lamps of nearly the same intensity as their cousins on the floor. These were positioned such that, in complement with the overhead lighting (set to maximum brightness) the area was wholly illuminated, each person barely casting any shadow.
Next to Swinburne was Dr. Martell, lead researcher assigned to SCP-017. As Swinburne struggled with the suit, Martell gave a last-minute briefing.
"No cupping your hands; no walking with your legs too close together; remember to keep your fingers loose and apart."
"Uh-huh." Swinburne pulled his right arm into the sleeve of the suit.
"Walk in a shuffling motion. At no point should you raise your feet—-even with the room as bright as it is, a foot even a centimeter above the ground is likely to cast a minute shadow."
"Roger." The left arm went next.
"Carry the package away from your body, at chest level. The lamps are designed to be incredibly easy to replace. Pop out the recessed trim on the spotlight, unscrew the old bulb, and screw the new one in. After installation, the new unit will return to full brightness in just under a second. The bulbs are hot, but you shouldn't have to worry—your suit is insulated well enough, and we keep that room frosty to prevent other bulbs from overheating."
"Got it."
"And most importantly, be aware of your body movements. There are lamps recessed into the floor of the containment room, with just enough spacing to move through without blocking them. Slow, deliberate movements are key here. The suit is reflective enough that a slight interference with the lamps' beams should be relatively safe, but we're obviously not in the business to take those chances."
"You don't need to tell me that." Swinburne zippered shut the mask to the neck portion, noting that even the zipper and slider were coated with ultra-reflective chromium. He adjusted the mask so that the eye pieces lined up perfectly. The eyepieces were made of highly tinted, very dark lenses that appeared contiguous with the rest of the suit. He pushed his earpiece deeper into his ear, a piece connected to a radio with a voice-activated switch, which completely eliminated the need to touch anything. With that, he was done. Fully suited-up. Ready to go in.
Martell gave him one last look-over, and nodded. "Alright. There's nothing else to say except get in, get out, and-good luck."
The two shook hands, and Swinburne carefully picked up the replacement bulb. Martell went to the door to 017 and began the process of opening it; a primary swipe-access card, followed by a biometric palm scanner, a retina scan, and a voice-recognition system. If any of these failed, access would be denied unless overridden by one of the facility's Deputy Directors or higher.
After a moment, the light over the door blinked green. Access granted.
Dr. Martell pulled open the door and nodded one last time. Swinburne stepped into the cell, which was actually an elevator—the real containment area was below. Martell closed the door, the hermetic seal making a hiss sound as it closed up. And then Swinburne was moving down.
Swinburne, like most Level-2 Technicians, knew he was replaceable. It came with the territory. Though obviously not as knowledgeable about the SCP-objects contained at Area-12 as other personnel, he knew two things-how to perform necessary maintenance on a variety of the containment zones at Area-12, and how to keep his mouth shut. Prior to employment by the Foundation, he had served as a combat engineer in the Army. He was used to the chain of command, taking orders, and especially the impending sense of danger. He'd served two tours in Afghanistan, earning an Army Commendation Medal and a Purple Heart; the leg still hurt like a bitch sometimes. This was, of course, before he had been selected as a 'special candidate' for something called the 'Foundation'—back then, he'd had no idea what that word would come to mean. But he'd passed the evals and qualifications, ending up one among only three other such individuals. Of course the Foundation had had to reveal some of its nature before signing on potential valuable personnel; a Level-2 Tech was a far greater asset to the Foundation than a handful of Level-0 service personnel, and especially more valuable than a Class-D (although they were useful in their own right.) So when Swinburne had heard of anomalous materials, special containment procedures, and the need to secure, contain, and protect; he'd been intrigued. Not particularly religious, he still possessed a mite of wonderment about things; the world was interesting, and a chance to be a part of an organization that revealed just how interesting was not an opportunity he was willing to pass up. That and, refusal of the Foundation's offer came under penalty of amnestics and total relocation. So he'd accepted.
As it so happened, nothing could really have prepared him for the reality of the Foundation. He had seen things that he wouldn't have believed possible, things that no person could ever have dreamed of. Of course, he knew, it was better that way. To disrupt the status quo of the outside world with knowledge it was not prepared for would be disastrous. Although some of the things the Foundation kept contained were disastrous to begin with.
For instance, this object, SCP-017. Swinburne had read the file on it—a being composed seemingly of smoke or shadow that could completely eradicate anything that cast a shadow upon it. Things like that were horrifying in fiction, but to know that they actually existed and were being kept under lock-and-key by some paragovernmental agency? It was almost too much to comprehend. No wonder the Foundation scheduled so many regular psychological checkups.
The lift reached the bottom of the shaft. In front of Swinburne stretched a small corridor, with high-powered lamps set into the floor, ceiling, and walls. Even with the thick insulated suit on, Swinburne was cold. Martell hadn't been lying when he said they kept it frosty: it must have been -6 Centigrade. Though that was probably a good thing; so many lights operating round-the-clock were likely prone to overheating and potential failure. The Foundation always did everything possible to prevent such a thing from occurring.
At the end of the corridor was a glass door with a glass handle, the kind of doors you see in supermarkets. Swinburne took a deep breath, swallowed hard, then used his knee to push open the door into the main containment chamber for SCP-017.
The entire room was bathed in brilliant, white light, emanating from every possible surface. There must have been hundreds of high-powered incandescent bulbs in the six-meter-cubed area. Swinburne thought it a Godsend that the Foundation had the resources to keep these sorts of facilities operating. He looked up and saw the clear plastic suspension chamber in the center of the room that contained 017 itself; a small Perspex box, maybe the size of a safe. Huddled against one of the transparent walls was a childlike figure, a perfect dark blot against the blinding light in the rest of the chamber. It was completely immobile and looked, for all intents and purposes, harmless. Though anyone who had clearance to perform maintenance on Cell 017 knew better. Inside the suit, and despite the cold, a bead of sweat rolled down Swinburne's forehead. He forced himself to maintain composure. The slightest misstep or error would cost him his life. He had seen combat before, in the Army, but that was under different terms; a man shooting a bullet into your body is natural, acceptable. This…this was anomalous.
Swinburne squinted, scanning the bright room to locate the blown-out bulb. It was on the opposite side on the room at about waist-height. Thank God it hadn't been one of the bulbs in the ceiling. Slowly, being careful not to step in front of any lights unnecessarily, he made his way across the room. Despite his training, his Army experience, every terror he had ever experienced, this really took the cake. Swinburne could feel his heart hammering in his chest, his body break out in a sweat, and his mouth wither like an African drought. Each step he took closer to his destination was one step closer to potential oblivion at the hands of the thing suspended above him. He wanted to look up, make sure that it wasn't moving or reacting, but he forced himself to keep moving ahead, bulb held out in his hands in front of him, every motion calculated so as not to create any shadow.
"What's your status, Swinburne?"
Martell's voice in his ear gave him a start. He kept steady hands on the bulb and took the final few steps to the blown-out bulb.
"I'm at the blow-out now," he said, speaking aloud into the receiver. "Everything's optimal so far. No activity on zero-one-seven."
"Good. You know what to do if there's any change in the situation."
"Roger."
The line went silent. Swinburne knew that to change the blow-out, he'd have to be blocking several of the containment lamps. That wasn't a problem, though; there were enough lamps in the room, coupled with the high reflectivity of the suit, to ensure that no shadows would be cast.
Swinburne bent down and used his hands to pry out the recessed trim around the bulb, a circular trim coated with chromium. Carefully, he set it down on the ground and started to unscrew the blown-out bulb. Initially, the bulb refused to move, but after a few good clockwise twists, it started to come out. A shiver ran down Swinburne's spine, thinking of the thing to which his back was turned. After a few more twists, the old bulb was released. He set it next to the chromium trim and began to screw in the new bulb.
For those precious few moments of counter-clockwise screwing, only one thought passed through Swinburne's head:
"Pleasegodpleasegodpleasegodworkdontfailpleasegod"
And then the new bulb was glowing bright, causing Swinburne to squint. He popped the trim back into place, took the old bulb, and headed back towards the lift. Only once did he glance back up at 017, hanging in its suspension chamber. As always, it was immobile, but all the same, another shiver passed through Swinburne's body.
When he was back into the lift and it was moving up, away from the mad chamber holding a monster, Swinburne collapsed, slinking against the wall of the lift and fighting back great heaving sobs. He managed to stand and compose himself before the lift opened out into the hall of Containment Wing Beta. Swinburne pulled the zipper down on his suit and pulled off the face mask, sucking in great gulps of air. He gave Dr. Martell and the other members of Response Team Echo a thumbs-up.
Dr. Martell nodded and spoke into a walkie-talkie. "System malfunction rectified, stand down THREATCON Omega. Repeat, system malfunction rectified."
After a moment, the flashing hazard lights shut off. Over the PA system, a voice declared:
"Attention all personnel: THREATCON in Containment Wing Beta has been set to Neutral. All personnel are to return to their duties as normal. Repeat, THREATCON in Containment Wing Beta…
Martell walked over to Swinburne and clapped him on the shoulder.
"Good work, Lloyd. C'mon, let's get some coffee at the canteen."
Lloyd Swinburne nodded, feeling more drained than he had ever been. As the two men walked down the hall, the message on the loudspeaker continued to play; Response Team Echo dispersed and went back to stand-by, and researchers and staff went about their duties in Containment Wing Beta as if nothing had happened.


“Step forwards, D-0912.”
My name is Andrew Carter.
D-0912's feet carried him on a path, straight and true, across the threshold of the door. The bright glare of lights shone into his face. Jagged shadows cut across the room's surfaces, drawing the sharp angles of unidentifiable forms. The silhouette of a chair jutted out of the floor in the middle of the room.
Behind him, D-0912 heard the voice of the doctor who had followed him into the room. “You will be vaccinated against an anomalous pathogen. Later, we will conduct tests of the vaccine's effectiveness. Sit in the chair.”
Two men with black combat gear hugging tight to their faces flanked the door. D-0912 did not turn to look at them. The men with guns were routine at this point. He wondered what sort of organization would steal its own workers' faces like this, but it made sense. He and they were all brothers in sacrifice.
In the smoky recesses of his mind, D-0912 had a vision: some great god of the wild with the body of a man and the blood of a beast had shambled into the human world. On its skin the ways and boundaries of the world twisted and split into a sign, and the people beheld the sign, and by the sign they knew of the god's power. The people of the world saw that the god at once knew and unmade the laws of nature, and they looked upon the god with terror and wonder. So when the time of the sacrifice came, necessary because the god demanded it, demanded by the god because it was necessary, the people became envious of those who would be brought into the presence of the god and killed as tribute. There was some gargantuan thing moving in the world, sifting through the body of humanity, taking what it took and leaving what remained in the wake of its passing. D-0912 was but plankton and krill, and the whales were descending.
D-0912 heard the sound of footsteps padding lightly against a forest floor as the god moved forth.
“Sit in the chair, D-0912.”
D-0912 lowered himself onto the high chair and felt the cold metal of its seat press against his flesh. The two guards at the door stepped forwards and strapped his limbs to the chair's arms. D-0912 stared into the flat glossy blackness of their visors, placid like a lake's surface, and felt only the lurking presence of some great and unknown Leviathan staring back.
Why was he here?
His brain dove into the lake, grasping for that Leviathan, until his lungs burned and he had to surface. Why was he here? Nothing added up. There was this faint memory of a crime that he had committed dangling off the end of his mind. Maybe it was murder. Who knew? Why did the people without faces even care if he had killed a man? The world was large, and the Foundation was larger, and a gunshot ringing out on a hot July afternoon was very small.
So then…
D-0912's mind continued to wander. He had no idea who was in his family or what life he had once lived. He only knew that he had committed a crime. But there was still a nagging incoherency in that thought. If he was guilty of some terrible crime, how had the Foundation gotten its hands on him? Why him? Supposedly, there were very few people in the world with hands as dirty as his, and D-0912 was sure that, for some reason, a great many people were all very interested in the fates of him and his fellow condemned. So why would the Foundation take these conspicuous people for their sacrifices? It didn't add up.
And why would the Foundation bestow the honor of sacrifice to the basest members of society? Surely these were experiments that warranted a great level of precision and finesse, and surely the question of menial labor could be answered with machines or simply ignored. What purpose did thugs and imbeciles have amongst the temple of the gods, where the Foundation tried to unravel the mysteries of the world?
D-0912's mind wandered along the paths of heaven and hell. Who had put those thoughts there? Did he learn them in jail? It was absurdly impossible.
The world came back into the focus of D-0912's consciousness. Slowly, he relaxed into the chair. “You're giving me a vaccination?”
“That's right,” the man in the lab coat said. He did not make eye contact with D-0912.
D-0912's mouth curled. He spoke slowly, measuredly, as he stared at the doctor's face. “Good day to give somebody a vaccination, isn't it?”
The man checked something off his clipboard.
“Are you sure you can't make more use of me? Why would you throw away a tool for the greater good so easily?”
Silence.
D-0912 felt the bitter juice of his words drip down his lips. “Surely you will humor a man about to die.”
The man in the lab coat looked up. “I don't know what you're talking about.”
Of course he was going to die. From the guards at the door, to the chair that restrained him in the center of the room, to the cold, impassive face of the doctor—only an idiot could possibly believe that death was not imminent.
“The straps are loose,” D-0912 said. He wiggled his arms in them to demonstrate. “Are you going to fix it?”
The doctor looked back down at his clipboard again.
There were bits and pieces of D-0912's psyche that were missing. He couldn't find the part of himself that was supposed to be afraid of death, but he also couldn't find the part that was supposed to be tired of life. His past had been ripped from him, and his future turned in on itself in circles. Maybe he had never truly been alive. Every breath that he had taken in the hazy uncertainty of the past had been a lie. He could not remember any of it because he had not been truly alive then, and his future was ending because he wasn't alive enough now for it to matter.
He held no animosity towards the Foundation. They did what they did. He hated only the idiots, scurrying around inside the bones of the Foundation, who prodded him into rooms with guns and locked the doors of his cell at night. These people formed the thin, tenuous link between him and the rest of human existence. Was he not drifting through a dream, with no reality to latch onto, and nobody to tell him that he had to wake up?
There was something written in the lines of his soul that had been obscured by the sands of a broken memory. D-0912 imagined men chopping wood and carving stone to build a tower reaching towards the heavens. Were the wood and stone destroyed as the tower was made, or had the tower always been written in the grain of the wood and the edges of the stone? When the silk and gold of an empire were presented before an emperor, had it always been known to the universe that the silkworms spun and the gold glittered but to adorn a mortal's halls?
The doctor took D-0912's sleeves and bared his arms. He held a needle in his hands. D-0912's eyes tried to trace the tip of the needle, thin and imperceptible. The doctor held an impossibly fine knife in his hands. Light glinted off the edge and stabbed into D-0912's eyes. He was naked before the terrible ecstasy of—
The needle pricked D-0912's skin. Chemical radiance coursed through his veins and poured into his mind as the room began to disintegrate. Light began to overcome his vision.
Above him, the figure in white blinked as an expression of satisfied completion passed over his face. The two guards glanced at each other. D-0912 thought that he could see them nodding.
D-0912 struggled to move his lips. What did you do? What have you done to me?
He spoke in slurred, barely audible words. “S-stop this. Oh God—”
The darkness of the forest burst its bounds and flowed out into the world. D-0912 walked the twisted path of enlightenment and understood: no road ran straight. The world was a maze, and a corridor only seemed straight if nothing but that path could be seen. The ways of light all pointed to an all-encompassing, maddening blackness. Smoking chemical fire danced and sparked, drawing him forwards, until he was stumbling and lost in the depths of the forest.
As the beasts of the forest began to howl around him, D-0912 remembered.

His name was Andrew Carter.
“You are being given a chance to redeem yourself,” the man in the lab coat said. “By participating in the SCP Foundation's D-Class personnel program for one month, you earn your freedom.”
“I earn my freedom?” he asked. His mind stuttered for a moment before he realized again—yes, he was a criminal. But then—
“You're lying. I am not a criminal.”
“No,” the man said. “You're not. But I wasn't lying. You need redemption.”
“I won't be told that I need redemption from people who detain, experiment on, and torture the innocent.”
His name was Andrew Carter, and he had committed no crime.
“You violated me. You made my own brain lie to itself. You had me pretend to be a criminal.”
The man laughed. “And you believed the lie so easily. Who are you to say who you are when you cannot even remember your own past? Why are you so firm in your belief that your mind is your own? What crime do we commit in trespassing upon something that does not even belong to you? You were born ignorant of yourself.”
“Nobody knows themselves. How do you expect me to?”
“I can expect you to know your function. A hammer that does not know that it is a hammer is useless.”
“So who are you?"
The lab coat fell away from the man. He stood; his eyes burned as two lanterns swaying in a night breeze; his hair grew wild. D-0912 saw the ways written into his flesh twist and splinter. He saw him crack open his sinewy maw and saw inside the belly of the beast. It churned and frothed as the rotting flesh of the sacrifice melted.
The beast said, “If you do not know yourself, then your sacrifice is meaningless. You will know that the flesh of a man is transformed into the spirit of a god. When you know this, you will find your redemption.”
“I will not be a sacrifice,” D-0912 said.
The beast laughed again, and it seemed that all the smoke and shadow of the world laughed with it.
His name was Andrew Carter.
Before him, a metal fence extended into the distance before curving out of sight. There were towers interspersed along the fence. Two guards stood watch behind him.
The fence's gate swung open.
“Enter the gate, D-0912,” said the guard on the left.
D-0912 took a step forwards and stopped. “No,” he said. “I think we all know what the definition of insanity is. I've done all of this before, but you made me forget.”
The guard on the right raised his weapon. “If you do not comply, we will shoot.”
“Then shoot me,” D-0912 said.
The Foundation had made him walk the twisting road to the end of history, and now all cycles were coming to an end. His name was Andrew Carter, and all of this had happened before, but the time for it to happen again had passed.
As the echoes of a gunshot rang through the air, D-0912 collapsed to the ground. He saw through the gate to the village beyond. Numbers flew through the air and wrapped themselves around the villagers. They were marching, row by row, just as he had seen them do, time after time again. He remembered feeling the numbers slide into his own brain. They had formed expressions and equations that blossomed into a billion different right and wrong evaluations, as truth and falsehood were demoted to special cases of general chaos. He had said the words, then: My name is Andrew Carter. The words made a sign, and in all signs there was power. But the numbers and equations that proliferated in the air had power of their own. They formed rows and columns, and if D-0912 looked at them from far enough away there was a sign written in the pattern of the numbers. He had seen this sign again and again, and the Foundation had made his mind forget it again and again, so his mind went chasing after the sign and the source of the sign's power until he finally found it, wrapped up in the branches of a wild apple tree, hidden where no human eyes had wandered.
The two guards knelt on either side of D-0912. “What do you see?” asked the one on his left.
He saw a machine without a craftsman begin to move, for even those things without a maker still had purpose.
“But if you have no maker, how do you know what your purpose is?” asked the one on the right.
Somewhere deep in the forest, where all the twisting paths met and became one, there, intermingled with the whispering of the wind and the bestial cries of the night, the god of the wild's laughter echoed in defiance of an answer.
His name was Andrew Carter. The crisp, sweet taste of apples lingered on his tongue.
For his entire life he had been seeing double. There was one world in which roads and buildings ran straight, and clouds drifted across the sky in set paths, and the earth rotated peacefully around a tranquil sun. There was another world where singularities and vacuums shattered the underpinnings of the universe, where fractal patterns spread out across the ground and radiated like halos from the unthinkable minds of human beings, and the roads diverged from one another in angles and spirals. There was one world in which the Foundation thought only about costs and benefits and how to best maximize utility for seven billion people, and where, no matter what, the Foundation was the greater good, which justified the exploitation of death row inmates for the purposes of advancing the Foundation's knowledge so that the Foundation could better protect—
It was a ball of contradictions incoherent in its simplicity.
There was another world. Truth had abandoned the Foundation. Truth was a matter of consensus, and the Foundation dissented to maintain that consensus. There was no truth to describe the Foundation. It had been and it always would be. It was that it was. There was nothing else.
And as for him…
There was one world in which his life's path was a straight line from birth to death. There was another world in which his life twisted ever upwards, towards the unbounded blackness of the night, where something was calling for him, drawing him closer to a place where he would know what his function was. He would be that he would be.
He had always seen this world. As light begot darkness, darkness concealed light. Information was hidden in all things. Viewed myopically enough, a curve became straight, a maze became a path, and a pattern became meaningless. The foundations of the universe were contradiction after contradiction: the confusion of the maze became the clarity of the truth. D-0912 had seen the paths of the forest twist and spiral—he had been lost—and now a grand pattern began to explode before his eyes.
He saw the chemical light inside of his body—the hydrogen chains twisting into benzene rings, functional groups combining to form something unexpected. He had been played. This molecule could not possibly kill him. It was similar in a way to the amnestics he had been repeatedly dosed with, but at the same time different…
His name was Andrew Carter, and he was going to live.

“Doctor Wainwright?” said the guard on the right.
The man in the lab coat looked up from the still body of D-0912. “Sir?”
“Leave us now.”
The doctor nodded. “Yes, sir.”
He stared at the floor as he made his way out of the room.
The guard on the left adjusted his visor to make direct eye contact with his companion. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Look.”
He took out a syringe of red liquid from behind his back.
“Do not implicate me in your misdemeanors, Adam.”
“Don't blame me for trying to share.”
“You are to find the Site Director and return that to him immediately. Petty theft from Foundation employees who know no better is rather distasteful. Furthermore, HALMAS is a Level 5 controlled substance. Its unregulated distribution is punishable—“
“It's fine,” Adam said, slipping the syringe into his pocket. “I'll let the go-between know, and he'll tell the O5s. Jesus, Basam, do you really think that I'd let the O5s lose track of some of their HALMAS?”
“You are growing decadent in your usage of that substance.”
“I am taking what is due to me.”
In the chair before them, D-0912's body convulsed. A low groan escaped his frothy lips. Immediately, the two guards moved forwards and removed his restraints.
“Andrew Carter?” Basam asked. Slowly, D-0912 opened his eyes.
“You didn't kill me.”
“We were not planning on doing so,” Basam said.
“You took me from the real world in order to make me into something. Direct, uncontrolled exposure to the Foundation's anomalies—repeated amnesticization—leading me to believe that I would eventually be killed—all so that my mind would be in the perfect position for the Foundation to change it with whatever is in that man's pocket.”
D-0912 extended a finger at Adam, who offered a faint smile back.
“Already knowing things that you shouldn't know. Aren't you precocious?” he said.
“You have been altered,” Basam said, “to meet the specifications of a top-secret project. Over the course of your future, you will learn more about the Foundation than any of your previous jailors ever knew or could have hoped to guess at. You will join a group that is at the very head of the Foundation. For your entire life, this has been your purpose.”
D-0912 felt the rotting flesh of the now-dead disguise that had hidden Andrew Carter fall away.
“Welcome to Mobile Task Force Alpha-1.”


Bender's Day!
The SCP Foundation's greatest (and only) holiday! It only comes once a year — except for last year when Bright slept through the first one and wanted a do-over.
Bender's Day!
A day when everyone smiles — in fact, it's the same smile! A big, shiny grin, complete with steaming hot identical teeth.
Bender's Day!
Parades through the corridors! Mass consumption of Class-A amnesiacs, which records seem to indicate is tradition! And, of course, the annual Site-19 SCP Sparkle Spectacular, broadcast live to Foundation staff and family worldwide through closed-circuit television.
What a show!
Children beg their parents for an extra hour before bedtime. D-Class beg their handlers for an extra day before termination. Tickets sell for millions — or, more commonly, are received free of charge with minor bloodstains.
Bender's Day was special, alright, even if no-one on Earth could remember exactly why. There was no mystery about what made the Sparkle Spectacular special, though. It was the one time of the year when security classifications didn't matter, where even the lowliest of level-one workers got a chance to see into the world of the Foundation and witness the incredible beauty and wonder of the SCP items. One brief display, before they were once again locked away, safe and secure, to protect the world from the unimaginable power of the anomalous.

"Heads up, dickweed!" Agent DeLaurier yelled.
He booted an instance of SCP-131 in Dr Patil's general direction. The Eye Pod sailed through an open window and splattered on the pavement below.
"DeLaurier!" Patil yelped, "What in hell is wrong with you? You have got to stop kicking Euclids around the office. Management counts those, you know."
"Calm down, Patil," said DeLaurier, "It's a Safe. Besides, if something goes wrong, I can always just clone another one."
The agent stepped into Dr Patil's office. He held two drinks in his hands. He took a sip from his own, which was in the standard paper cup, and set a luminescent white thermos down on Patil's desk.
Dr Patil sighed, "Still, though. People are trying to work. I have like two hundred and fifty containment breach incident reports to fill out from this month alone." He gestured to the stack of forms on the desk beside him.
"Patil, it's Bender's Day," said DeLaurier, "Nobody works on Bender's Day. The laws of physics take a break on Bender's Day. Relax. I brought you your coffee, just the way you like it: 'Doctor Patil's Favorite Drink', Very Fine."
Patil picked up the thermos, frowning. He could hear banging noises coming from the inside.
"DeLaurier, I take my coffee Fine, not Very Fine," he said. DeLaurier shrugged. Patil held the thermos away from his face and cautiously unscrewed the lid. A tiny brown hand reached up over the rim.
Patil slammed the lid back down, "Dammit, DeLaurier! It's another Coffee Man."
"Oops. Sorry."
"Apologising isn't going to erase my drink's consciousness, Agent."
"You can run him through again on Rough," DeLaurier suggested. Patil rolled his eyes and started shaking the thermos violently. After about thirty seconds the banging noises were replaced by the slosh of hot dead Coffee Man, and Patil took a sip. He wrinkled his nose. The coffee was good — in fact, it was perfect, as specified — but the casual murder had left a bad taste in his mouth. He set the thermos down on the table and returned to the stack of forms.
"Oh, for Clef's sake…." he said. His pen scribbled uselessly against the paper, leaving only a series of creases. "Bloody pen's run out of ink."
"There's one," said DeLaurier, pointing to a white retractable pen lying on Patil's desk.
Patil shook his head, "Better not. I think that kills family members. You couldn't loan me one, could you?"
DeLaurier's face brightened.
"Matter of fact, Retrieval brought this thing in today!" he said. He reached into a jacket pocket, and tossed out a pale green fountain pen. Patil caught it, and immediately felt ghostly shivers down the length of his arm as some unseen demonic force took control over his body.
"Oh dear." he said.
"What's wrong?"
"The pen's moving all by itself," said Patil, "Using my body as a vessel. Scrawling out some eldritch message from the shadowlands that lie beneath the world of men."
"Is it still filling out the form?"
Patil looked down.

Initial cause of breach
Agent Oum was recklessly cavorting with a Keter class itTHERE IS A MALEVOLENT FORCE THAT HAS TORN THE WORLD ALL WILL PERISH ALL WILL SUFFER ESPECIALLY YOU PATIL AND YOUR TIE LOOKS SHIT AND YOU SM

"More or less," he said.
"Then I don't see the issue," DeLaurier shrugged, "Hey, I managed to get a ticket to the Sparkle Spectacular this year."
"What? Are you serious?" spluttered Patil, "How the hell did you manage that?"
"I was standing right next Agent See when he died. Grabbed the ticket out of his pocket!" grinned DeLaurier, "Full discount!"
"That's very …. thrifty."
"But here's the even better news, dude. I swung by 038 on the way here, and…" DeLaurier reached into his pocket and pulled out two tickets.
"Whaaaaaat!"
"I know, right?"
"Holy shit, DeLaurier!" Patil jumped up out of his seat and punched the air, "We're going to the Site 19 SCP Sparkle Spectacular!"
"We're going to eat magic food!" said DeLaurier.
"And see the senior staff!"
"And watch skips blow shit up!"
"And eat magic food!"
"And see the senior staff!"
"I've realised now that there's not actually a lot of variety at this event, but I'm still excited anyway!" Patil whooped. He grabbed the stack of forms off his desk, and flung them out the window along with the possessed pen.

Suggested containment procedure reform
A SHIFT IN REALITY HAS OCCURRED THAT WILL TARNISH THE VERY NATURE OF HEY WHAT AAAAAAA PATIL YOU FUCK AAAAAAAAAAAAAA HELP ME OH SHIT SHIT SHITSHITSHITSHITHSHIT

Patil and DeLaurier watched for a moment as the forms folded themselves into paper airplanes and swooped down to divebomb the splattered Eye Pod. Patil turned to DeLaurier.
"Let's roll," he said. DeLaurier grinned and opened the door. The two stepped out into corridor, where they were met with the sprawled out corpse of a man covered with ears, blood oozing from his mouth and bulging eyes. DeLaurier snapped his fingers.
"Oh, right!" he said, "Forgot to mention. Teddy Bear's turned evil now."

They made it through the corridors without encountering any demonic teddy bears, and DeLaurier had decided that 1048 had probably stumbled into the teleportation pool or choked to death on a peanut or something. It had happened before.
The security guard running admissions had barely even looked at their tickets, and had shown no suspicion at the fact that they were not only registered to a different agent, but also completely identical.
"That was almost too easy," muttered Patil.
"Well, we're not the Secure, Secure, Secure Foundation," DeLaurier whispered back, "And it is Bender's Day."
They reached the entrance to the Sparkle Spectacular Grand Ballroom, which this year was located inside an anomalously enlarged broom closet. Patil put one hand on the doorhandle.
"Have you ever been to one of these before?" he asked.
"Never," said DeLaurier, "You?"
"I dreamt about it once," Patil said, "But it was just a regular dream, not an anomalous dream, so it was likely inaccurate."
"Lucky," said DeLaurier, "I only ever dream about a weird dude in a business suit telling me that the world is being twisted into a terrible caricature of reality. Now come on, let's do this thing!"
Patil took a deep breath and opened the door. His jaw dropped, and beside him he heard DeLaurier gasp.
The room was huge, cavernous, unbelievably, almost grotesquely massive. Patil knew the standard unit of measurement in these situations was football fields, but he had never been much of sportsman. Suffice it to say that you could have flown a helicopter around the ceiling without risk of disturbing any of the hundreds of people milling about on the floor.
They had entered into the dining area of the room. Smaller tables were scattered around, surrounding a circular buffet area that seemed to contain mostly cakes. On the far side of the room, however many minutes walk away, there was a large stage, at the moment obscured by what appeared to be a projector screen, displaying festive images of some of the more amenable SCP items. As he watched, the image on the screen shifted from an orange blob bouncing gently up and down, to the front half of a white cat chasing an Eye Pod around and around in circles. As he looked closer, Patil could see that the edges of the screen were ragged, and pieces seemed to be moving away and reattaching somewhat randomly. The image shifted again, rippling outwards from the centre of the screen, and Patil realised what was going on.
"It's the butterflies!" he said, "Kondraki's butterflies! Which means…"
"Fuck yo' butterflies," DeLaurier said. He had noticed the buffet table, "They have infinite pizza here! Yes!"
DeLaurier shoved Patil aside as he dashed off across the banquet hall. Patil looked around the room for a sight of the notorious doctor and legendary action hero, but Kondraki didn't seem to be present. In the approximate centre of the room, however, between the dining area and the stage, there was a strange white structure that didn't match the rest of the décor. It seemed to be made all of one contiguous piece, grown out of the floor. A spiralling stalk lead up to a round pod the size of a small room, towering high above the rest of the festivities. The sides and ceiling of the pod looked to be made of glass, or at least something transparent, but the angle made it impossible to see inside. In there, Patil was sure, was Kondraki, and probably the rest of the Senior Staff.
People passing by the base of the stalk gave it a wide berth. Although it was rarely stated, there was a definite rule to working in Site 19: You don't fuck with the Senior Staff.
You don't fuck with the Senior Staff.
Patil followed DeLaurier over to the buffet table, where he had already amassed three plates of his own favourite pizza. He was explaining his strategy to the server, a surly German with freakishly long arms, who seemed entirely disinterested.
"… and the candy's good, but if you can only take two, that's just going to confuse your appetite," said DeLaurier, "Better to be consistent, let your stomach know what the plan is. Keter Cakes are fools gold, obviously—"
"Obviously," said the German.
"— because there's an infinite supply. You can have Keter Cakes any day of the year, hell, the Foundation'll pay you overtime for it. You know how hard it is to book testing time with the infinite pizza? It's hard. Now, noodles are good usually, but I never really liked the special ones because my dad walked out when I was ten—"
"Can't imagine why."
"— and they usually have a good spread from the vending machine but you can't guarantee that they won't melt your tongue or turn you to ash or something," DeLaurier said. Somehow, he had gone through five slices of pizza without ever having stopped talking. Patil was a little amazed. DeLaurier noticed him, "Hey Patil! I was just telling Mr Chirurg about my patented Bender's Day Banquet Buffet Battle Plan."
Patil smiled uneasily. Mr Chirurg had a look in his eye that suggested DeLaurier was about to need an actual battle plan if he kept talking much longer.
"Tell you what, Agent, maybe we should go try some of the other food," Patil said. He spotted a blue La Choy box on the table and picked it up, "You tried one of these fortune cookies yet?"
They each took one and cracked it open eagerly. A scream came from the chocolate fountain around the other side of the table, and Chirurg scuttled off to investigate. Patil looked at his fortune.

You will find reality is not as it should be.

He rolled his eyes.
"These things never come true," he said, "What fortune did you get, DeLaurier?"
DeLaurier looked up. He was holding the box of cookies up to his face, and was covered in crumbs.
"Fortune? I've just been running a train on these cookies, man." he said. Realisation struck, "Oh, right, fortunes! Yeah, the slips of paper. Sure, check 'em out."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small sheaf of paper slips, handing them to Patil. Patil started reading through them as the agent went back to gorging himself on empty carbs.

Bad luck lies around the corner.

Enjoy the night to its fullest, you will not live to regret it.

Make hay while the sun shines, it may not shine much longer.

Keep eating cookies, diabetes isn't going to be a problem.

Ugh. You're not even going to read this fortune, are you? Or any other fortune, for that matter. Or anything else, ever.

Your lucky numbers are:
UG . ON . DI . EB . IT . CH

Say goodbye to your legs, asshole.

"Eh, they're all pretty vague," said Patil.
The sound of trumpets blared out from the speakers that lined the room. The butterflies on the stage shifted into an image of red curtains, embossed with the words 'The Site 19 SCP Sparkle Spectacular'. A hush went over the room, and the hundreds of Foundation personnel stopped eating and talking and avoiding bloodthirsty chocolate ants and moved towards the stage, shuffling into their seats. Patil and DeLaurier, with their forged ticket, stood behind the back row. As the trumpets died down, the butterfly curtains parted, and the hosts of the evening stepped out onto the stage.
She was a young woman in a red evening gown. He was a small, hairy man in a custom fit tuxedo. Patil recognised the man from his wanderings about the site, as he imagined most of the other personnel did, and a wave of good vibes filled the room. The hosts stepped up to a podium at the side of the stage, the woman helping the man climb atop a stepladder so that he could be visible. The butterflies closed behind them.
"Good evening, everyone!" he said, "And welcome to the Site 19 SCP Sparkle Spectacular! My Item Number is SCP-208, but most of you around the site probably know me as that little fellow who makes you feel good! Tonight, you can just call me Bes!"
The crowd cheered.
"I fuckin' love Bes," whispered DeLaurier. A few people around them overheard and nodded in agreement, "He's such a good guy."
Patil smiled back, "He's so friendly. He reminds me of the Teddy Bear, before it started performing abortions."
"My Item Number is SCP-105, and my name is Iris!" said his co-host. There was a mixed reception.
Bes took the microphone again and began to recite his opening speech.
"It's been a big year for the SCP Foundation," he said, "Since our last Bender's Day celebration, we've captured eight new SCP items, lost sixteen, and accidentally destroyed twenty-five. I guess you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eldritch abominations! We've also been responsible for fourteen thousand civilian casualties, which is well within the limits of acceptable collateral damage. Well done, everyone!"
Iris began talking again, "Before we get started on the real show, we have a few awards to give out. Our first presenter tonight is a lovely young humanoid called SCP-187!"
The butterfly curtains parted again, and a young woman stepped out onto the stage. The crowd applauded, but as she moved beyond the range of the dazzling lights, she froze, and screamed, and covered her eyes. The crowd went silent, and Patil could just barely hear her shrieking voice.
"They're all dead!" the girl screamed, "They're all fucking dead!"
She ran off stage, clawing at her eyes and shrieking. Bes and Iris looked at each other.
"This is a disaster," DeLaurier muttered. Patil nodded his head in agreement. "This is a BK-Class 'Total Buzzkill' Scenario."
"Let's skip ahead!" said Bes, "The Site 19 SCP Sparkle Spectacular… starts right now!"

"How do they get all the skips to behave?" asked DeLaurier. Men made of fire swooped through the air above their heads, spinning and looping and firing jets of flame that nearly singed the crowd. A giant mechanical spider crawled along the wall, occasionally shooting sprays of gasoline out of a squirt cannon, which the fiery creatures would dive into, bursting into brilliant explosions and emerging at twice their original size, before splitting in two and spiralling away again.
Up on the stage was a tank of water. One of the flaming creatures circled above it, creating a ring of fire which an invisible shark was apparently jumping through. The crowd had gotten tired of that pretty quick.
"They have a skip who can control minds," said Patil, "All he has to do is say 'You want not to hurt us,' or 'You want to do a bunch of crazy loops in the air,' and they'll do it."
"We probably should've gotten him in with the Teddy Bear," mused DeLaurier.
"Do you reckon they've caught that thing yet?"
"Shh, I'm watching the show."
The flaming men retreated into tanks on the ceiling, and the giant spider crawled over to the stage to drag the shark away. The butterflies began to swarm around again, creating jagged, menacing shapes and twisted patterns. A single spotlight focused on the stage, and the floor began to bubble. An oozing, sick black slime dribbled up from the ground, and a rotting corpse dripping with blood and bile rose slowly through out of it. In its hand it held a human skull, half shorn of flesh and compacted into a dense rod of splintered bone and brain. The spinal cord trailed from it, wrapped in a winding string of barbed wire that intertwined with a sparking electrical cable leading down under the stage.
The Old Man raised his hellish microphone to his crooked mouth and began to sing.
"Myyyyy bonny lies over the ocean…"
He lifted a hand imploringly. The crowd chanted back.
"MY BONNY LIES OVER THE OCEAN!"
The Old Man's smile widened and he moved on to the next line.
"… my bonny lies oooooooover the oceeeean!"
This continued for at least ten minutes, before the Old Man dropped the mic, clapped his hands with a single wet, thick splattering noise, and sank back below the stage.
Bes and Iris returned to the podium, carefully avoiding the cancerous sludge. A large metal cage, the contents completely covered, was wheeled in from offstage.
"Well, it's the moment you've all been waiting for!" said Iris, "One our most popular SCP items of all time!"
"The guy you love to hate!" said Bes.
"He may find us disgusting, but we find him delightful!" said Iris, "Everybody, put your hands together for the king of Keter…"
"The sultan of sapient non-humanoids…"
"The ombudsman of overly-long termination logs…"
"The bestest lizerd ever…"
"The Hard-to-Destroy Reptile himself…
"SCP-682!"
"Who will be performing an interpretive dance routine!"
The crowd cheered. Patil and DeLaurier jumped in the air and bumped chests. There was so much whooping that it sounded like an alarm had gone off. The Senior Staff box was dead silent, but Patil tried not to pay attention to that. You don't fuck with the Senior Staff.
On stage, Iris and Bes each took hold of a lever on the side of 682's cage, nodded to each other, and pulled down. The door swung open, falling forwards to clatter onto the floor. The whole crowd held their breath, pressing forwards to see the contents of the stage.
SCP-682 lay motionless, its back torn apart. leaving a gaping hollow of blood and tattered organs that were ever-so-slowly beginning to heal together.
"What the fuck?" said DeLaurier. On stage, Bes tilted his head to the side, confused. He stepped into the cage to investigate, and a gleaming, bloody metal teddy bear burst through 682's face, slicing Bes in half with a single slash of its steel claws.
Patil's breath caught in his throat. The world seemed to freeze, seemed to change colour, seemed to go completely cold. He heard someone scream, and wasn't sure if it was DeLaurier, or Iris up on the stage, or someone in the crowd, or the whole crowd, or the whole world. The metal bear galloped off the stage, diving into the crowd as if it was a pool of water. A spray of blood and flying body parts moved through the audience like a non-invisible shark's fin, belying the motions of the speeding, slashing, murderous bear. From SCP-682's bloodied body more bears began to emerge, bears made of bone, or nerves, or clotted blood. The next few seconds were pure panic, terror. Patil and DeLaurier ran for the exit, leaving the crowd behind them, trapped between the rows of chairs.
Patil could feel the sound behind him, pressing against him like a solid wall of screams and roars. Blood splattered against his neck. He and DeLaurier parted to go around the stalk of the Senior Staff box, because regardless of circumstances, you don't fuck with the Senior Staff. Patil emerged from the other side of the stalk, and so did DeLaurier's legs.
Patil swore, and heard a metallic shriek from right behind him.

"Who's that guy down there?" asked Dr Bright.
"The bear?" asked Clef.
"The Indian in the labcoat," Bright said. He pointed him out, "The running man. The one who's still alive."
Dr Crow pressed his snout up against the glass and squinted, "You know, I think I've seen that fellow around the place. He works in containment, I believe. Something Patil."
"I hope he doesn't try and fuck with us," muttered Clef.
"Well, he's dead now," said Kondraki. The metal bear held up Patil's severed head in its shining crimson claw and howled, a distorted mechanical screech of bloodlust and victory. The doctors leaned back in their seats and sighed.
"You know what?" said Dr Clef, "That was pretty fucking spectacular."

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The office was neat. It clearly belonged to someone who had too much time on their hands. Every piece of paper on the desk was stacked neatly into three vertical piles, each the same height. There was a small pot of pens, and about ten cheap biros in it. They all looked brand new; the owner had never needed to replace them. Next to it was a name plate, with the words “Dr. W. A. Hamilton” engraved on it. At the centre of it all was a balding, middle-aged man named Hamilton. He sat at his desk, staring at the door, and watched silently as it opened.
In stepped Sanchez, a young, nervous research assistant. He pushed his glasses up, as they were beginning to slip down his sweat-covered face. Hamilton stood to greet him, and they shook hands.
“Please, take a seat,” said Hamilton. Sanchez complied.
“So, Sanchez, what is it that you wanted to talk about?”
“Well, sir, I was browsing through some old newspapers, and found this.”
Sanchez retrieved a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and pressed it onto the table.
“It says that, two days ago, a Mr. Walter Copper died due to a broken spine. Reasons unknown.”
“And?”
“Well, according to his wife, he was just eating breakfast. She came back in the room, and he was dead.”
“How is this relevant?” asked Hamilton, who was beginning to think his time was being wasted. Sanchez would be desperate to try and show his command he had his eye on the ball, yet this would just make him look like an idiot.
“W-well, sir, he was reported as having a spoon in his hand when he died.”
Hamilton was about to laugh at the absurdity of the sentence, when he realized the full implications of what was being said.
“You mean it's like-“
Hamilton never finished, as Sanchez was clearly desperate to get his point across.
“SCP-463.”
Hamilton stood up, knocking over the pot of pens as he did so.
“Has it breached containment?” he asked, his voice a tone of worry.
“I checked with Doctor Nauls, nothing happened. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Hamilton began to relax, but stopped himself just before he did.
“S-sir, I-I think…” began Sanchez, whose voice was filled with worry.
“I think there's more than one.”
Hamilton stared vacantly at Sanchez, before snapping out of it.
“Alright, have you told anyone else?” he asked hastily.
“N-no…” said Sanchez, quietly.
“I'll get supervisor Childs, you try and get me all the information on Copper.”
“Sir, just one more thing…”
“What?” said Hamilton impatiently. He grabbed the pen pot and slammed it onto the table, upright.
“Why spoons? It seems a bit random.”
“I don't know, Sanchez,” he said, as he grabbed a few pens at once at dropped them into the pot.
“And we'll-“
Hamilton never finished. He was going back for a second handful of pens, when he stopped suddenly. For an instant, he stood perfectly still. Then his head snapped backwards violently, and he slowly fell onto the floor, his head smashing against the wall as he fell.
Sanchez jumped up suddenly, making his chair fall on the floor.
“Oh JESUS!” he shouted, as he tried to get as far away from Hamilton as possible.
He looked over the desk, to see Hamilton's empty expression staring back at him. He was dead.
In his hand, was a pen.
Sanchez stood in silence, for what could have been either seconds or hours, before finally whispering, "They're everywhere…"

The shed had a strong smell of damp and sweat. The wooden boards that composed it were filled with rot. It was the only room in the shed, and a few rays of sunlight from the setting sun seeped in through the murky windows.
This was where I was born. No, born isn't the right word for it. Created, maybe.
Or fabricated.
My existence began with a blinding flash of light, followed by a view of the shed's ceiling. I don't know how, but I knew. I knew that the sky was blue, that I had just been born, the capital of Latvia, all the languages in the world; I knew. I don't know how, but I knew.
I attempted to move, but I was unable to. Then, I realized what I was. My eyes - or at least what I used to see - were located in a shallow, oval-shaped bowl. The rest of my body was composed up of a single thin bar.
I was a spoon.
I was completely unable to move, I was trapped.
Then, my view of the ceiling was interrupted by someone's head. He was white, overweight, and his head was devoid of any hair. He then spoke the first words I'd ever hear.
“Goddamn it! Fucking thing didn't work!” he shouted, in a slightly Welsh accent.
He picked me up, and inspected me. Then, he threw me to the ground in rage.
“Why won't it just work? I paid good money for that!”
When I hit the ground, it was the first time I had ever felt pain.
That was immediately followed by the first ever feelings of rage. I couldn't move, why? Why me? What did I do? Why? Why? Why?
I landed on the floor, angled in such a way I could still see the man. He was leaning on a table; presumably where I was created.
He grabbed a scrap of paper, and began scribbling down notes on it. Then, he pressed on the pen so hard it went through the paper, causing him to scream in rage. He threw his pen across the room, breaking it.
Then, he kicked open the door to the shed, kicking in closed as he fumed back to his house.
I didn't know at the time, but that would be the last time I ever saw him. It would be years until I saw anyone else.
I think it was years, anyway. He left me to fester in the shed, to rot, to die. Eventually I began to wish I could. There was nothing but the shed. I couldn't move, I couldn't escape, I couldn't scream.
I could watch, and I could hear, and I could smell.
I could see the moss slowly grow around me until it encompassed me, leaving me with nothing but darkness to look at.
I could hear the patter of rain that I would never feel, the trickle of water that I would never drink.
I could smell the linger of damp that encased the shed, the slow, rotting body of a nearby rodent.
I think my creator killed himself after I failed to show any signs of life, that 200 days of work resulted in no pay off. Ironically, he succeeded.
Why did he succeed? What was he even trying to do? Why did it have to be me?
Maybe it was years. Maybe decades, or even centuries. I waited. And waited. And waited.
I could think, my mind was complete.
Eventually it was filled with only one thought.
Revenge.
It took a few years, but eventually the moss rotted away. The shed was different when I next saw it; the table had gone, and a few random objects lay on the floor, all covered in rust. Hundreds of dead flies were everywhere.
Someone entered the shed again. He was tall, white, and much thinner than the only other human being I had ever seen. Dust and cobwebs flew into his face, but he brushed them away.
“Jesus, Terry, this place is really fucking old,” he said, looking behind him.
He lowered his head down, to see old random objects on the floor, such as a disc, a playing card, and a small scrap of paper.
“This stuff might be worth something, actually.”
“Yeah, Paul, I'm sure someone will pay millions for some old king of clubs you found in a random shed…”
Paul continued to search. Finally, he came to me.
He picked me up, and inspected me.
“What's that?” asked Terry, who had entered behind Paul.
“Just this old spoon.”
“Oh wow, a spoon! That was obviously worth going here!” said Terry, putting on a mock voice.
“Well, it might be worth a few quid. This looks pretty well made.”
“Let's have a look.”
Paul passed me to Terry.
Terry looked at me, his expression one of disgust, before he turned me around.
“Ah!” he shouted out of shock, and he threw me to the ground.
“What?” asked Paul.
“It's got a massive lump of mould on the back of it! I'm not fucking touching it!”
“Fine. When I've sold it for millions, you won't get any.”
Terry let out a small laugh.
“Yeah, I'm so jealous,” he said, sarcastically.
I could only watch as Terry left, and Paul leaned down to retrieve me.
I hated them. I had realized that I would be stuck, that they didn't care.
He picked me up.
I still do not know how exactly I did it. The build-up of rage had been going for years, probably more.
In a single second, all of that energy was released.
Paul was in the doorway of the shed, when his head snapped back violently, and he fell to the floor with a thud.
Terry must have heard it, and he turned, still smiling.
His face instantly contorted into a face of horror. Even from several feet away, Paul's death was obvious. His neck was angled awkwardly, his back bent over itself. His eyes were open, gazing vacantly at the ground. His mouth was open slightly, a small pool of saliva dribbling onto the ground.
Paul's body was dead, but a small part of him survived. He wished he was dead, but he wasn't. I knew his fate, and he knew mine the second I killed him. He was now me. His mind was transported into another spoon, somewhere in the world. There was a weak, extremely weak, telepathic connection. I could see, and smell, and hear what he could see, smell and hear. I think he was somewhere in a kitchen. I took his knowledge as well.
I would force him to kill. If anyone touched him, they would die. If anyone touched me, they would die. Humanity had left me to rot in a shed for years; I would have my revenge.
Terry panicked, and ran, as he retrieved his phone, and hastily began dialing 999.
It took ten minutes, and I was stuck in Paul's cold, dead hand for all of it. It was better than the shed, at least. It was summer, and I wasn't in the shade. Sure, British summers were pretty shitty, but it was at least warm.
That was the first - and only - time I was in the sun.
I managed to get a good look at the house. The windows were boarded up, and parts had completely collapsed. Nettles and grass grew everywhere; the house had clearly been abandoned some time ago.
Sirens loomed closer. Eventually, the paramedics arrived. They walked around the house; there were no fence to stop them.
They all wore high visibility jackets, and carried a stretcher between them. Terry was nowhere to be seen.
They all bent down, and laid the stretcher next to Paul's dead body. Two of them lifted Paul- and myself- up onto the stretcher.
One of them must have noticed me. Rigor Mortis had not yet set in; he attempted to remove me from Paul's grasp.
I was ready, but he wasn't.
He let out a scream, and collapsed to the floor. One of the medics, who was standing the closest to him, spoke.
"Shit, Ryan, you ok?" she asked, walking slightly closer.
Ryan just let out another scream.
"Oh Christ."
His back was bent at awkward angles, and blood was pouring out of his mouth, while he continued to scream.
"Shit, Dave, Steve, get the spine board."
Steve and Dave exited, running.

It was an hour later, when I learnt, much to my disappointment, that Ryan had survived.
However, Paul had managed to kill two more people. Two more people who could join my ranks.
The police arrived shortly afterwards.
There were eight of them, five men, three women. They took Terry, Ryan, Steve, Dave, and the female paramedic whose name I had never learnt away for questioning.
They all inspected the area. When Ryan broke his back, I had landed nearby in the grass.
Three figures approached. They must of had realized what I was capable of, as they edged slowly towards me. I noticed one of them, the tallest, had a pair of tongs in her hands.
"Alright. There it is. Benny, you got the safe?" asked the one whose hands were empty.
Benny acknowledged him silently by nodding his head and holding out a small, cubical metal box.
"Good. Amanda, you ready?"
"Yeah. Let's just do this."
She bent her knees slightly, and gripped me with the tongs, before dropping me into the box.
Benny closed the lid on it instantly, and I was left in darkness.
When the darkness finally ended, I was in a small glass display case.
Ten faces watched me, from outside the glass. All peering in, all desperate to know what I was.
I would show them.
All of them.
If they want to know what it's like to be me, I'll let them.
I've picked up the occasional piece of information from the Class-D they send me. They're throwing fuel on the bonfire, and I'm all too happy to spread.
They recently found out there's more than one of me, but it was worth it.
I absorbed the knowledge and thoughts of Doctor Wilford Anthony Hamilton.
I know their secrets.
And they know mine.
I am SCP-463.


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Once upon a time, there was a small cabin in the woods. The cabin was the home to an old man, greying and stooped over, yet possessing a kindly smile to all who he saw. The warm and cozy cabin was tucked away into a shallow bend of the road. Here, the old man had stored countless piles of metal, wood, scraps of cloth or fur, and countless tools. Large tools, small tools, long tools, and short tools. Spinning tools, drilling tools, fine tools, and blunt tools. Tools and tools and tools were scattered around the place, for tools were his life. The old man spent his days as a tinkerer, fixing, polishing, working, and creating.
Every day, the tinkerer would pack his wares and his tools on to his trusty donkey. He would climb aboard it with his aging, but steady hands, and he would take a journey through the woods and streams where he lived to a nearby town. When he reached town, he beat his pots, pans, and tools in a cacophonous crash that sounded the arrival of the tinkerer.
The people in the town were familiar with the old man. When they heard his ringing call, the wives would run forward with their pots and kettles and brushes and mirrors for him to fix. The men would come forward, and ask for scraps of metal for their homes, or to peruse the wares that he offered. And finally, the children came forward to give him their toys and their baubles to tinker and fix.
And so, the tinkerer made his living, getting a bit of bread, cold meat, and water to live on, with an extra coin or two that could always be saved up for a special occasion.
The tinkerer had raised a pair of boisterous boys, who in turn had their own children as well. The youngest child of his younger son was named Piotr, and the tinkerer loved him very much.
Piotr had been born early, and his mother had died while giving birth. When Piotr was born, the midwife had told his father to smother the baby. The old man intervened, and Piotr lived. Though his father did not care for him, little Piotr was beloved by his grandfather.
The boy could not run or play like the other children. He was too frail and too sickly to play the rough and tumble games of the other children. He had a weak heart, and could not breathe well even at the best of times. And so, Piotr stayed in bed.
The father did not care for Piotr like he did with his other children: big, strapping boys who fought and played like real boys should, and pretty, quiet girls who did what they were told. Piotr, with his wandering mind and his physical weakness did not concern him. And yet, the old man favored him the most out of all of his grandchildren. He begged his son to let him take care of the boy, but, much as his son did not care for Piotr, he cared for his own father even less.
The tinkerer was saddened at the sight of the boy, who languished in bed all day, with only a large window and his imagination for company. The tinkerer took it upon himself to help his favorite grandson. He took scraps of tin and brass from his supply, and he set to work. Laboring for a week, his creation slowly took shape.
One day, the old man journeyed to his son's house and presented the young boy with a blanket-covered item. Then, with a majestic flourish, he unveiled his creation, revealing a small iron cage. Perched within the cage was a bird.
The bird was crafted of metal, yet possessed soft features and intricate details, as if it were a real nightingale frozen in a metal embrace. It turned its head and peered at the boy. Then, it opened its beak and began to sing.
The song was a beautiful étude that sprang forth from the bird, as if it contained an entire orchestra within. Then, the bird warbled in a pure song of its natural calling, as it hopped off its perch. The tinkerer opened the door, and the bird flew out.
It cut a delicate arc through the air, flapping its wings and singing mixtures of natural birdsong and scraps of music. It cut circles through the air with the ease of a real bird, before finally coming to a halt, and perching within Piotr's outstretched palms.
The boy cried with delight, and the commotion drew the attention of his father. His father was similarly amazed with the beauty of the bird, which continued to sing as it nuzzled the cheek of the boy.
They had never seen anything like it before, and as the sickly child giggled and played with his pet, he almost appeared like a normal boy. The old man's heart swelled with joy at the reward of his long labor.
From then on, the tinkerer would take every coin that he saved, and buy scraps of metal, porcelain, and glass that he could not get himself. Then, with the pound of his hammer, or the twist of his drill, the tinkerer would make a new toy for the child.
There were toy soldiers who would fight each other, falling in combat, and then rising again, over and over, as much as the boy wanted. There was a ball that could change its size and fly through the air by itself, to help the boy who could not throw. Dolls that would come to life and talk. A mirror that showed the viewer any place in the world.
The tinkerer never got tired of making toys for the boy. As the boy grew older, he became less frail, and could go outside. His father allowed him to go to school with the other children. And of course, to accompany the boy on his voyage was his faithful metal bird.
When the boy showed the other children his pet, they shouted with glee and crowded little Piotr, asking him where he had gotten such a marvelous toy. Piotr told them all that his grandfather had made it for him, beaming with pride.
Soon, all of the children wanted toys from Piotr's grandfather. The tinkerer was inundated with a horde of children who were dissatisfied with their own mundane dolls and tin soldiers. The tinkerer saw their expectant faces every time that he went to town, and soon, the children stopped asking him to fix their toys. They wanted him to make better ones. They wanted something new. They wanted something entertaining. They wanted something wonderful.
And so, the old man set to work, making more toys. Each and every one of them was a glory to see, something that amazed children and adults alike. His hands and his tools could spin marvels out of ordinary tin, and legends out of iron. Every toy that he made was better than the last. Over time, less people wanted tinkering done. They wanted toys. Then, one day, the tinkerer stopped tinkering. He became a toymaker.
Soon, news of the magical toymaker and his curiosities spread over the countryside like wildfire. People came from all around to get a glimpse of him, and to buy a toy. Noblemen paid lavish sums for their sons and daughters to receive the best toys, wrought of gold and silver, while even the poorest peasants could afford a coin for a simpler toy for their children. The toymaker became richer and richer, yet, at his heart, he remained a kindly old man who wanted nothing more than to see the smile of his children who loved him and his toys.
Although the toymaker became busier and busier, he never forgot little Piotr. Any of his toys would go to Piotr first, and he would make sure to create finer and more grandiose versions for the child that he loved best.
However, there were those who resented the old man. His younger son was not pleased with the whole affair, and believed that Piotr was getting far more attention than he deserved. As they are wont to do, his children heard and felt the ill will that their father had nursed in his heart, and soon, they came to resent their youngest brother as well.
The toymaker's oldest grandson, Aleksey, was not happy. He was envious of his youngest brother, and how he always received the finest and grandest toys first. He wanted his brother's toys, and he wanted to please his father. One day, he decided to act on both.
Piotr was playing in the grass with his grandfather's latest invention, a puppy made of cloth and buttons. The little boy giggled at the sight of the exuberant puppy, running around and yipping. His bird happily chirped on his shoulder.
Aleksey approached Piotr. His shadow cast a looming darkness over Piotr that made the little boy look up into the eyes of his older brother. Oblivious to the malice in Aleksey's eyes, Piotr broadly smiled when he saw his older brother.
Aleksey demanded that Piotr give him the puppy. Piotr cocked his head, confused, and asked why. Aleksey ordered his brother, saying that he was older, and therefore deserved it.
Piotr stood up in fear as he realized Aleksey's intentions, and began to back away, while holding his puppy. The bird took to the air, and loudly chirped at Aleksey. Aleksey demanded the puppy again. Piotr swung his head from side to side. The poor boy never saw the hit coming.
Aleksey smacked Piotr across the head, causing the boy to cry out in fear, and making him drop the puppy, which ran off, yipping along the way. Aleksey continued to kick and punch his younger brother, screaming at him for taking his right as the eldest. Piotr sobbed and tried to get away. Aleksey continued to furiously beat the child.
Then, the songbird dove down and raked Aleksey's face, causing the older child to scream in pain. Piotr shakily stood up, and began to run, for the very first time in his life. The bird followed along as Aleksey cursed his brother while he screamed in pain from the metal talons that had carved furrows across his face.
Piotr continued to run, but the sickly child could not keep running. As he ran, deeper in the forest, he quickly began to exhaust himself. His pitiful heart struggled futilely as it beat faster and faster, trying to keep the boy's body going. Piotr fell to his knees as his tired heart exploded from the exertion.
The boy fell face first into the grass of the forest, cold and unfeeling. As soon as his beloved bird saw what had happened, it flew off, heading for its original home: the toymaker's cabin.
Days after the death of the boy, people noticed that the toymaker had gone as well. His marvelous toys stopped being made. Those who went to his cabin saw that it was boarded up, and no smoke rose from the chimney that adorned the roof.
People were confused and sad. The toys that had brightened the lives of so many were gone. The toymaker began to slip away from memory as his toys broke or became lost. Soon, the people began to forget that he had ever existed, and as time went on, he became more and more of a fairy tale. His cabin was swallowed up by the woods, and the people's lives went on.
All until one day, far in the future, one of the toymaker's descendants came looking for the cabin of his once-famous relative. Though the world had forgotten the old man, stories had continued to be passed down in the toymaker's family, and a few of the most cherished toys still remained. Through the ages, the family had kept quiet. Many had tried to replicate what the toymaker had done, but none had quite the magic in their hands that he seemed to possess. They could not find his cabin, and soon, most gave up the search as fruitless.
This child chose to come and find what remained, and what could be discovered. This child would not be discouraged.
After searching for hours and hours, he came upon a dilapidated cabin in the woods, which stood near the shallow bend of an old country road. He managed to tear down the rotting boarding covering the door, and he broke in. Using his flashlight, he peered around the former home of the marvelous tinkerer.
Inside, heaps and stacks of materials, long rusted and faded remained. Blueprints and designs for new toys were brittle and yellowed in their aging. Yet, throughout the cabin were hundreds upon hundreds of tools shone as brightly as if they had just been freshly polished. Large tools, small tools, long tools, and short tools. Spinning tools, drilling tools, fine tools, and blunt tools. Tools and tools and tools were scattered around the place. And in the middle of it all lay a true work of art.
It was a half constructed life-size model of a boy, made of the finest polished gold with silver inlays. Time had not dulled the surface, and the metal brightly shined. A half-finished arm lay on the table, open and showing the clockwork and parts that lay inside. The torso had been left open, demonstrating thousands of intricate parts and bits of odd materials, such as leaves, wood, and various runes and gemstones. On the table sat a jar containing a perfectly preserved, if somewhat small and bruised heart.
Scattered around the yet to be completed creation were pages upon pages of notes and scribblings in an awkward, stilted hand. They debated the best materials to use, what would last the longest, what could house a mind the most effectively.
As the young man examined all of this, he heard a short étude thrumming through the air. Looking up, he gazed with wonder as a beautifully carved metal bird flew through the air, and landed on his shoulder with a happy chirp. The man knelt down as he saw a delicate tool laying on the ground.
As he picked it up, it felt right in his hands, as if it belonged there. He began to fill his bag with all of the tools in the cabin, and he stuffed his backpack full of the blueprints and designs as well. Giving one last nod to the half-finished creation, he left the cabin and departed for home.
When he returned on his journey home, he pulled out a blueprint, and cleared his desk. He peered at the first design, and immediately began to get stacks of paper and a tool from his backpack. He grasped the tool, and touched it to the paper.
And then the wonder began.


☦A story that should have been cute.☦
There was nothing in this room but love for the little lizard. Barely twenty-five centimeters long, the twenty-five square meters of enclosure provided was a barren wasteland of love and affection.
It had gotten used to sleeping out in the open, with nothing but love to hide under and keep shelter. It curled up in the felt lining of its enclosure and dreamed of sand and warmth.

The room was filled with love when the lizard awakened. Love could not warm a room, and so the lizard who dreamed of hot desert sand awoke sluggish and cold. There was no sun to bask in, no heated pad underneath or lamp above. It dragged itself along the ground, against the walls, bumping its nose against the door that promised freedom away from this love-filled room.
A camera recorded the crawling movements to upload the footage to YouTube. Such a beloved little lizard was quick to receive attention in a medium it could not even comprehend. None of the affectionate comments or likes would ever be received.
It crawled away and, with nothing else left to do, curled up in the felt lining of its enclosure and dreamed of the crunch of insects against its teeth.

A human interrupted the dreams as it stomped into the room, sporting a white coat and a heart filled with love. The human kneeled down and produced a high pitched cry of affection as the lizard dragged itself to the human's outstretched hands. It knew those hands were its only source of warmth in this wasteland filled with love.
A passing memory came upon the lizard as it managed to barely lift its head upon the warm fingers. Similar hands long ago, dropping mealworms and crickets fat with nutrition into its sandy home of invisible walls and warmth. The lizard flickered its pink tongue across the fingers before it now, hoping to taste even a trace of those days. It tasted nothing but love as it was scooped up and pressed up against a face twice its size as the human cooed, charmed by its little lizard "kiss".
The little lizard curled up in those warm hands, the words of love spoken by the human going unacknowledged.

Once, a Kinder person arrived in the lizard's room of love. He cradled the lizard in his hands in silence. There were no words of love or affection. He could do nothing to fix anything here; the plot had already been written and the creature's fate had already been woven in. In one last act of Kindness, he allowed the lizard a long, long sleep.
It dreamed of its days before being bought by less kind, but more loving humans. The sand was warm. The water was cool and fresh. The insects were plentiful and its tail was fat with storage for leaner times. There were places to burrow and places to climb. There was no love.

It woke one last time, prodded out of its dream with the affectionate fingers of a human in a lab coat.
"Now, who's a good ickle lizard?"
The creature in question leaned into those fingers weakly.
"That's right! You are! Yes you are!"
Tried to close its eyes and go back to sleep. The pain in its empty belly hurt too much.
"Do you want to go play? Do you want to go play? Does the ickle lizard want to go play?"
It lifted its head to the hand, opening its mouth in memory of being able to reach up and grab dangling food.
"D-085, come look! He's smiling at me!"
There was nothing to grab here but love.
"Is he not just the cutest lizard D-085?"
The second man approached and looked down at the thing he was asked to witness. It looked less like a lizard and more like a wrinkly, rotting banana with legs. Its tail was rail-thin with starvation, its eyes sunken in with dehydration.
"Sorry, I don't really like lizards. They kinda scare me."
The lizard tried to crawl away with the renewed vigor of provided body heat. One last time, to search for food.
"Look what you've done now! Get out! Get out now!"
Its limbs collapsed underneath its skeleton-and-skin body, too weak to hunt.
"It's ok little guy, who's still the cutest lizard? Who's still the cutest lizard? That's right it's you!"
The human spoke with love and filled its room with love but love could not fill its long-empty belly or warm its chilled bones or give it shelter. The little lizard was drowned in the infinite love of humans.
When it closed its eyes for the last time, the lizard dreamed that it had arrived in a place with no love. It didn't wake up.


The following article is an excerpted transcript, which has been annotated and pulled from article #232397 — Home Video17.mov.
Personnel who require either the entire Home Video17 entry or a full transcript of Home Video17 should consult section HVAA#0000017 of the eVisual-Library archives.
Transcript Log-232391-17-2:

Subject-2323 is referred to as "dad" in article #232398 and refers to child subject in the video with the name "Daniel".
00'34'' - Subject-2323 carries a camera and approaches a male child estimated to be between the age of 6 and 9. At a distance of roughly one meter, subject-2323 speaks to the child.
Subject-2323: Danny, try this.
Daniel: What is it?
Subject-2323: Just try it, I picked it from the garden.
Daniel: Okay daddy.
01'46'' - Male child consumes unknown substance and promptly displays discomfort.
Daniel: My hands are itchy. I'm allergic.

Subject-2323: Relax, it's just your nerves.
Daniel: What was it? I'm so itchy.
Subject-2323: It's okay.
Daniel: I need to get it out. I need, it hurts, it's hurting me.
Subject-2323: Don't worry.
02'21'' - Male child begins to chew on his own right palm between thumb and index finger. Child breaks skin with his teeth. The composition of his tissue is revealed to have a saturated green colour. No blood is visible from the puncture wound. Child begins weeping.
Daniel: What's happening daddy? Make it stop please.
04'43'' - Child appears panicked and begins to fidget.
04'52'' - Child uses his left hand to pick at and pull green tissue out of his right hand.
Daniel: What is this daddy?
Subject-2323: That's a slice of cucumber.
05'22'' - Child cries out and continues to weep.
Daniel: Please make it stop daddy. What are these?
05'46'' - Child removes shirt and begins peeling discolored skin off of body.
Subject-2323: That's a cabbage leaf.
Daniel: It's in my body.
Subject-2323: You're salad now.
07'13'' - Child continues weeping and promptly expires. Child's entire figure blends to the colour and texture of lettuce, cucumbers and broccoli over a period of nine minutes.
Subject-2323: Daniel? Hello?
Subject-2323: You know, some people would kill to be salad.
Subject-2323: Freaking entitled generation.
22'38'' - Subject-2323 points camera at disfigured male child and begins to shuffle through the child's flesh. Child's connective tissue is no longer present.
Subject-2323: Do you have my strawberries in there?
23'01'' - Subject-2323 continues to shift around child's flesh for approximately thirty four seconds then sighs and promptly drops the camera.
Subject-2323: Another disappointment.