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#header h1 a::before {
    content: "SCP Foundation";
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#header h2 span::before {
    content: "Survey, Consult, Predict";
    color: black;
}

by stormbreath

July 3rd
It would be a hot summer.
Doctor Leslie Yolas was sitting on her porch, watching the sun sink below the horizon beyond endless rows of corn. She had moved back to the family farm not too long ago, and was still getting settled. Before she had moved back, it had been years since she was last here, but her situation changed and this is where she belonged now. Next to the doctor was her dog, slumped on the porch next to the chair. All was quiet, as things should be.
July 5th
Two days later (having taken the holiday off), Yolas drove to Site-19, ready for another day of the same old business as she had grown used to. She hadn't always worked in Site-19, but her previous Site simply didn't exist anymore. Most Foundation sites had been shuttered, in fact - only Site-19 remained, as a testament to the past.
The parking lot was mostly empty, as it normally was these days. There wasn't any need for the activity that the site had required in the past. There had been times when Yolas had thought that might happen, but it still surprised her how it came to past. She had always expected a little more doomsday in the desertion of Site-19. She had always expected one of those, to be honest.
Where had once been a plethora of guards and gates surrounding the entrance to the Site, there was now just a single guard at the gate. Yolas didn't even bother to show her ID as she walked in - there was, simply, no need. The guard knew her, and he could check her off at his own leisure. To be frank, there was little within Site-19 worth stealing.
Yolas took her time going to the labs where she worked, a stark change from how she used to act. There was simply no need for urgency anymore, and there had not been for some time. She ambled through the halls of Site-19, before entering her lab and turning on the lights.
She was surrounded by walls of instruments and empty desks. Hers was at the center, alone with a collection of personal effects. She didn't just have the one, to be specific - her materials spread out from the center, often finding themselves on other tables in the surrounding area.
As she entered the lab, she collected the papers that had been printed overnight, with the latest set of reports. This was her first task of the day, to look for any abnormalities in the data. There were thousands of fields — Hume counts, temperatures, radiation, just about anything that had ever come to mind as potentially important.
As always, none of it had deviated enough from the norm to be noteworthy for Yolas's purposes.
For her next task, she idly walked through the lab and made sure that all of the instruments were calibrated properly. They were. There was no reason they wouldn't be, or way that they couldn't have been.
She spent the rest of her day doing the minor tasks needed of her, but nothing important was necessary. Another uneventful day in Site-19.
July 9th
Once every other month, something would happen that would require the attention and intervention of a Mobile Task Force. In the past, there would be hundreds of Mission Control teams, working around the clock to monitor and assist the actions of every Mobile Task Force the Foundation would deploy.
Today, the number of such Mission Control teams was one, and it was a temporary job. Doctor Leslie Yolas was one of those people who would be called upon, since her normal monitoring mission did not truly need her working on it every day.
A thing had been spotted in the woods, and a Task Force had been deployed. It was a fast response time, but the Foundation did not have anything else to hold its attention. It could be one last remnant of the past or some other monster that haunted their nightmares and memories. There were a myriad of possibilities, a thousand things that it could be in the woods, and none of them were correct. None of them were around, not anymore.
It probably wouldn't be anything, of course. They were all quite sure that there was nothing that remained in the world that connected to their old motives, their old aims. Nothing that needed to be put into a box and studied, nothing that threatened the Veil. For once, normalcy was truly normal. For the civilians, for the Foundation, for everyone.
Yolas spent the day monitoring the task force as they failed to find anything. They searched the forest and didn't even find so much as a trace of a monster. No footprints, no droppings, nothing disturbed. It was all pristine and perfect, just as it should have been. Just as it always would be from here on out. Yolas didn't pay any attention to her regular duties: she knew it would fail to find anything as well. Everybody else that was left did the same. They all knew the truth.
The Foundation spent most of its time hunting down wisps and shadows, now. It didn't have anything better to do.
July 16th
Yolas was paid well, for the most part, even now that her work wasn't truly necessary. She didn't do much on a daily basis, but her role was high and her skills were unparalleled. If anything related to her old field should happen again, Yolas would be the best choice possible to handle the situation. No one else would even come close. After all, she had once had Level 5 Clearance. Still did, but there was nothing the Foundation needed to hide.
Her position was not necessary in the grand scheme of the world, but it was a necessity to the continuing operation of the Foundation. The Foundation was a grand machine, and Yolas was an essential part. The fact the machine was not needed did not change the fact that she was necessary to the machine.
The irony, if anything, was that her role in the machine was to tell it that all was calm and right, that nothing was wrong with the world. She checked her instruments, made sure they were functioning as they should, and submitted the same report on a regular basis. To be fair, it wasn't the same report, exactly: only a report that hadn't changed in years, with no indication that it would ever be different.
The Foundation had been rich, a sprawling monolith of power and control for decades. It had fingers in many pies, many of which had nothing to do with the anomalous. The list of front agencies it had maintained was absurd, in all honesty. When the primary directive of the Foundation became obsolete, the decision from the Overseers was to keep the fronts active. It would be too suspicious if they all folded in on themselves, without any good reason.
Funny how that worked, isn't it? The Overseers gave the front agencies a stay of execution, but their positions did not last quite as long as the groups they kept active. Spicy Crust Pizza had outlasted O5-1.
And so the Foundation, despite its drastically reduced scope and need for money, had remained influential, with billions to spare. All of the land they had acquired over the years, now without any meaning to keep, was sold for a reasonable price, and there were now plenty homeowners with no knowledge of the horrors that had lived in them before they did.
Monoliths, such as the Foundation, don't topple easily. The reason the monument had been erected was gone, but it would endure. The wheels would keep on turning, in the hopes they might be needed once more.
July 29th
It was that damn dog. Yolas had been there for some of the first usages, and everyone was there at the end. She remembered those final days quite well: chaos, bizarre orders, and the knowledge she had to obey. Because if it was crazy and it worked, it wasn't supposed to be crazy, right? Everything at the end worked, so they weren't crazy.
But when Yolas had been ordered to "sing electric, as a thousand fires had died in her eyes", she didn't get the logic. It was nonsensical, completely devoid of meaning. And yet, it all worked out when she did it. The anomalies faded, the world snapped into order and reassembled itself into convenient boxes. She watched as theories which had been filled with holes put themselves stitched themselves together into perfect little logics.
The theories that she had been working on melted before her eyes. Her department slipped out of her control. Her staff acted in bizarre manners and the world lost all logic. And the worst thing was that she had been more productive than ever. There was no compulsion, no cognitohazard, nothing that was forcing them to follow the orders.
But how could they not? It all worked.
August 2nd
"You know, Leslie, all I ever wanted was a better world. I dreamed of it every night. We went on thousands of wild goose chases hunting for a better world. I would have traded everything, I would have lost it all for even the slimmest chance of a better world. There was nothing I considered too great an evil. A better world. I knew it was out there.
"And we got it. We have the better world. We just had to trust a rather intelligent machine to do all the work for us. The one thing I regret - the one final sin - is … I don't know how it did it. We have our better world and all I know is that the world is good. The logic is inscrutable and unknowable, too strange for mortal eyes."
It was late at night and the Site-19 canteen was deserted but for Doctor Yolas and her dinner partner. He was a normal man, old and choking on his age. They sat across from each other, surrounded by empty tables that had once been able to fit hundreds, if not thousands. Only a small slice of the tables were ever used now. Even if you wanted to eat alone, there was plenty of room to do so without going too far from the counters.
"A final sin? I don't know if I would call it that."
"I suppose not a sin. But I built this Foundation to understand the world. To know how it works, in every last detail. No stone left unturned. There was so much that we never understood, never could have. Ever since I stood in that cave, watching as the water floated up, looking into the face of that impossibility… I knew what I wanted to do. It was always that nagging question of 'why', at the back of my mind."
"My department was one of the best at that, weren't we? We were so close to a complete working theory of the anomalous before the end. Only a few years away from being able to understand the underlying processes to the chaos, smooth out all the kinks."
"But then a bulldozer came. And it steamrolled every anomaly and flattened it into the dirt."
"It sure did. It did our job for us, better than we ever could. Far better."
They finished their meals in silence, mostly talking about the weather. But as the hours grew late, they realized it was time for bed. The Administrator retired to his on-site apartment, and the doctor drove home to a family farm.
August 11th
Back in her lab, Doctor Leslie Yolas, former level 5 Foundation personnel, former Head of the Ontokinetics Division, formerly one of the most powerful women in the world, watched her printer slowly churn out pages and pages of documents. As each sheet fell off the page, she grabbed it, skimmed it and threw it in the trash.
Nothing worth noting, as always.
She hadn't found anything this summer. Or the summer before, or the summer before that. And she knew that as long as she kept working here, she wouldn't find anything in any other summer. This was just the way things were now.
And as much as she hated it — as much as she detested the uncertainty of knowing why this was the new status quo — she could accept it. There was no point in questioning why her life was now functioning, why everything mattered once again, because it simply did now. It didn't matter how the world had gotten to this state. It was safe and calm, and that was all that mattered.
Her work for the day was done. She paused for a moment, trying to decide if she should clean up her lab, and decided against it. There wasn't any real point in it. It would all be the same tomorrow.
Back at home, she relaxed on the porch. Her old dog came out of the house and slumped down next to her, as she rocked back and forth. The sun set over what seemed like endless rows of normal corn, perfectly normal and unchanged. It was quiet, listening to the crickets chirp and the wind blow. Just as it should be.
It had been a hot summer.


by qntm

Previously

There's no day/night cycle.
Something like a week into his trek, Wheeler realises that he can perform an experiment. He selects a building with a high ceiling to sleep in, a library. Before turning in, he sets up a Foucault pendulum. He suspends a heavy rock by wire from the ceiling and sets it swinging. The following morning, the slow pendulum is still swinging, and it has precessed. It's swinging at about a right angle from the mark he made before he went to sleep.
That means the world is still spinning.
On reflection, he doesn't know if it proves anything. It's not clear whether the Sun or the Moon still exist, or any celestial object at all other than the red-black eye socket at the horizon. The eye never moves. It casts long, threatening shadows, while being bright enough to blind Wheeler whenever he has to walk in that approximate direction, which is about half the time. Regardless of the physical evidence, it doesn't feel as if he's walking on a real Earth, or fully awake. He feels like an ant, crawling across the face of a rough-hewn monolith, crawling into and out of the runes chiselled into the face of that monolith, runes which form an unstoppable, apocalyptic mythology. He has migraines, and there are blotchy multicoloured zigzags in his vision by the end of most "days". He feels as if the whole world is perpetually dropping away from beneath his feet, like he and it are both plummeting into an abyss.
He has not been caught yet. The violent phenomena Ulrich warned him about have not appeared, which makes him feel increasingly lucky, and nervous. He carries a looted gun, which he's practiced with a little — he's a better shot than he would have guessed, using his right hand alone. (His left hand, the mangled one, does nothing but shake. He has to keep it clutched to his chest when shooting.) The gun gives him less reassurance than he'd like. It feels as if, were he to end up in a situation, it could metamorphose suddenly from a working firearm into a fiddly metallic liability, an explosive distraction in his pocket. On occasion, on the horizon, he sees a skyscraper-sized figure stalking past. He holds still, or hides, and it doesn't see him. Other than that, the world is seemingly deserted, standing empty, like an overturned car in a muddy ditch. Open doors, lights still blinking. Wheeler feels… detached. Lucky. Guilty.
He keeps away from cities. He has not, yet, come within eyeshot of a sarcophagus — Ulrich was evasive in describing them, and advised him in the strongest possible terms to stay away from them. But on another "night", he selects a bad place to camp, where the wind and the local geography funnel the noise from one of the sarcophagi up to him from the valley. The noise, despite its faintness and distance, cultivates such intense and intolerable nightmares that he has to get up, pack up again and walk further away, as many more miles as it takes. The noise creates, in him, things which he dearly wants not to be flashbacks.
He goes into a shop and, along with packaged food and bottled water, steals a cheap digital wristwatch. It has a date function. Today is Monday the 17th of April; it's just gone lunchtime.
Time is still passing. On some level, all of this is factual. It's happening.

*

And if it's really happening, then, what?
There is no longer any ambiguity about what, specifically, is happening. Not in Wheeler's mind, or in anyone's. The world has long since passed through SCP-3125's antimemetic boundary layer and into its radioactive core. There is no longer a need for SCP-3125 to pretend that it is not what it plainly is. What else could it be? What difference could it make now, what could oppose it? It stands there in plain sight. Wheeler sees it. All of conscious reality sees it. It's happening everywhere, to everyone. It's not physically possible to conceive of anything else.
There is no worse case scenario than what's happening now. There's no race against time; there's no ticking clock; there's no last second, the last second was years ago. There's nothing to avert. This is it, the final game position, the highest and most refined form of human civilisation. This is the shape of the next million years.
SCP-3125 stands there. Monstrous, casual and indifferent.
And Wheeler is alone with his thoughts for a long period of time, and has little else to think about, and he wrinkles his brow, and he blinks a long blink, and looks again, and he realises what it was that he wasn't seeing—
SCP-3125 is standing there. Like a human stands.

*

He reaches Site 41 at the beginning of May. His body clock has wandered far out of skew by this point; it's technically around midnight when he first lays eyes on the place.
There is a protective field surrounding it, stamped into reality by the detonation of the antimemetic warhead, radiating out a few hundred metres beyond the Site's perimeter. It's a psychological repulsion, not a physical one. A thick bulwark of irrelevance. There's nothing here. Just keep walking. Despite being warned about it, Wheeler succumbs to the effect. Thirty minutes' walk down the road, he double-checks his map and realises what's happened and turns back. This happens a second time. On the third attempt, he makes it through. Dead reckoning and willpower.
For some reason, he had been imagining an ancient, dramatically overgrown ruin, but the containment breach which led to the Site's destruction happened only eighteen months ago, and the bomb blast which concluded the outbreak was figurative, not physical. About a third of Site 41's main building has been torn down, but the rest is perfectly intact and unmarred. Mother Nature has not reclaimed it. Gnarled trees are not sprouting from the damaged side.
Wheeler exhales. There is a still, safe atmosphere about the place. It's as if Site 41 has its own cool microclimate. It's easier to think. Even the light here is fractionally yellower, more natural.
The Site's main entrance is sealed with steel doors, but Wheeler circles around to the damaged side of the building, and is able to effect entry over the rubble. He moves at a medium-slow pace. He can't afford to blunder into anything, but if he goes too slowly, he knows, he'll overthink the situation, and become scared, and have to retreat all the way out of the building. The late Daisy Ulrich promised him that the Site was Safe. She then went to rather disconcerting lengths to explain precisely what "Safe" meant. No entities capable of spontaneously, actively harming a person; no entities in need of active, dynamic containment procedures. A Safe SCP can be left in a dark, locked room indefinitely with no risk, she explained.
"A nuclear bomb is Safe," she said, giving the canonical example.
"Well," he replied. "Up to a point."
The Site is Safe, he tells himself, creeping forward. The most dangerous things he's going to find are rats and— he jumps back, aiming his flashlight at a frightening shape— corpses.
The corpse is seated against a corridor wall. It's clutching a combat knife, which it seems to have buried up to the hilt in its own inner thigh, opening a gushing artery. Wheeler backs up against a wall, unable to look closely at the body but equally unable to let it out of his eyesight, in case it… does something. He feels faint. It doesn't help that at exactly that moment, the fluorescent lights in the corridor come up, triggered by his movement, giving him a much better look at the scene. The scene is about as bloody as any suicide can be.
"No, thank you," he says. He backs up. He backs all the way up the corridor and through the ruin to the virulent red place which passes for daylight, and there he throws up.

*

It takes a long time to talk himself back into it.
He finds many more bodies. Some of them are in groups, having died during violent altercations, or during more complex scenes which Wheeler cannot fully parse. Some of them are dismembered, or just scattered pieces. Some of them appear to have been dead for significantly longer than the rest; they are little more than wafer-thin skin wrapped around skeletons, and there are strange things written on the walls beside them. Wheeler never works out why.
There's still power. There's running water.
At first, nearly every door he meets is locked. But he steels his nerves, and returns to each of the dead Foundationers in turn, and retrieves their keys and security passes. Soon, he has the run of the place, with only a few highly secure control rooms and containment units denied to him.
At this point, his task has become open-ended. If Hughes is not somewhere on Site 41 — which he almost certainly isn't — Wheeler needs to find information leading to his true location. He needs data.
He collects devices: phones and laptops and computer terminals, Foundation-built with chunky form factors. Most of them need passwords or PINs, which he can't get, but a few can be unlocked using security passes or biometrics, which he can get if he carries the device back to the relevant corpse and presents their face or finger to the scanner. The devices still have power, too. Wheeler is unable to find anything resembling a battery readout on any of them. He is slowly learning a key lesson: the Foundation builds things to endure. And though the Foundation as a group of people is absent, the physical systems they built are still here, and functioning, and ready.
The SCP database is the most obvious icon on every device's home screen. Ulrich told him to look out for a particular sigil, concentric circles with three inward-pointing arrows. Inevitably, like an uncounted number of newcomer Foundationers before him, Wheeler loses a significant number of hours browsing the entries. The Foundation has a specific and recognisable house style, which is to describe even the most mind-bogglingly weird anomalies in absolutely mundane, factual terms. Even heavily redacted — different users see different amounts of redaction, but there is plenty of data which he can't access no matter whose identity he uses — it makes for bizarrely compelling reading.
Hughes is mentioned numerous times in the database. He seems to have multiple overlapping research specialities, and is credited in many entries as a containment architect. Wheeler takes detailed notes, assembling a picture of the man's career progression… and then randomly stumbles into the Foundation's own personnel records for Hughes, which line up almost exactly with what he just worked out.
There are huge holes in the personnel record. The last entry relating to Hughes' actual activities is in 2007. And then in 2010, after a gap of years, there's a final note, a single unauthored sentence:

It appears that those who know Hughes' fate meet it.
END OF FILE

Wheeler frowns at the unhelpful note for a long minute. It reads like a riddle. Wheeler was, for a long time, a crossword puzzle fiend, but it seems improbable to him that a clandestine organisation like the Foundation would leave cryptic clues for one another, rather than clear, direct instructions. Which means the note is probably intended to be read simply and literally: Don't look for Hughes unless you want to meet the same fate.
Wheeler tilts his chair back and stares at the ceiling, contemplatively. On the other hand, the note also means:
Hughes can be found. It's been done before.

*

There's no day/night cycle, but he's worn out. His body is telling him that he needs to sleep. He sleeps on a sofa in an employee break room, on the far side of the building from the red eye. There's a snack machine, and there are snacks in the machine, but he doesn't have any cash. He considers breaking the glass, but if he screws it up and cuts himself badly there isn't a single doctor left in the whole world who could stitch him up. He considers, and rules out, looting the nearest corpse for a dollar.
As he tries to sleep, something comes to him, an acute, anxious energy. It grips him by the shoulder. Get up, it screams at him, distantly. You cannot rest. Do the arithmetic. It's all still happening. MOVE.
He rolls over and ignores it.
And it bothers him, intellectually, that he can ignore it. He wonders if there is some vital organ missing from his body. He should be quivering with anger and terror right now, yes? Why, in his heart, is he so calm?
He looks at SCP-3125, whose very existence, on paper, should paralyse him with fear. He looks at what SCP-3125 is doing, which should fill every fibre of his being with furious purpose. And he looks at his own significance to the whole endeavour, and his own guesstimate of the odds. He does the arithmetic. And the product of all those factors rounds down to damn near zero.
This isn't going to work. That's why.
This has to stop! It has to end! PLEASE!
Curled up in his sleeping bag, eyes screwed shut, Adam Wheeler mutters to whatever may be listening:
"It isn't going to work."

*

Near the site entrance — he can't figure out how to unlock the steel doors, even from this side — he finds a security office, with printed floor plans of the whole Site. He crosses off the rooms he's visited, and the rooms which are destroyed. Everything remaining is locked. Above ground, anyway. Underground, there are warrens of tunnels, and dozens more containment units. And, thirty floors below ground, a single incredibly large vault of unstated purpose. This final vault draws his attention in, magnetically.
Ulrich assured him that the Site was totally Safe.
As the freight elevator descends, Wheeler finds that a kind of anxious pressure is building above him. The air is rapidly getting warmer, and he's just realised that if the elevator breaks down right now, he'll likely be helplessly trapped, and die. He shouldn't have used it. He should have used the emergency stairs. Too late.
The elevator lands. There's an empty corridor. He follows it, drawn forward. There's an airlock at the far end, a wall of white metal big enough to drive a truck through. The airlock is closed, but there are seven or eight overlapping circular holes punched through it, making a combined gap which is easily big enough to admit a human. Beyond the airlock, there is a vast dark space. Wheeler has climbed through the hole and walked five paces out into the darkness before he even thinks about what he's doing.
There are shapes out there, illuminated by the scant light falling from the airlock corridor — lumps which could be more dead people. Wheeler's own shadow blocks much of the light. He takes out his torch. It is absolutely silent down here, and the temperature is uncomfortable, making him sweat. The rest of the huge vault, as far as he can shine his light, is totally empty — but his torch is not powerful enough to illuminate a space this big, so it's hard to be certain.
He advances. A loud tone is building in his ears as he gets closer. There are… he counts… fourteen dead. Thirteen of them, dead in a rough circle around a fourteenth, a woman lying flat on her back. Just outside of the circle, there is a military truck with the inert remains of a complex machine mounted on its back. This, Wheeler surmises, is the antimemetic warhead. There is a cable leading down to a control unit lying on the floor, under the hand of the dead woman.
"Ah," he says, with a note of regret. "So you're the one."
Her security pass looks different from the others. It has a bright diagonal stripe across it in red and orange. He takes it. There's a roaring in his skull. He can't see it clearly at first — something is disturbing his vision, a gold-white spot in the corner of his eye, an artifact from the combination of extreme darkness and bright torchlight. He squints. It says "Marion Wheeler / Site Director".
He stares at it for a long time, weirdly disoriented. He doesn't exactly know why. It is, of course, a very commonplace name; if he stopped to gawp at every other Wheeler he met, he would never get anything done. Still, she's the one with her hand on the switch; she's the one who ended this local outbreak. Out of every dead Foundationer on this damned Site, she's the one who didn't die for no reason at all. He feels as if he should say a few words.
But they do not come to him.
He makes one quick circuit around the vault perimeter, scanning the floor and the wall, looking for anything interesting and finding nothing but construction tools and scaffolding. He returns to the airlock and then the freight elevator. He glares at it for a long, frustrated moment, and then accepts that it would be unsafe to use it again.
The emergency stairwell is perfectly well-lit, but thirty floors is a mountain. Three times on the way up, he has to stop to rest his knees.

*

The Site Director's pass gets him everything. Every control room, every containment unit, every file. He gets the whole story. He puts the last piece in place. He leaves a note, following the same hopeless, diligent ritual as the rest of the Antimemetics Division before him. He emerges from SCP-3125's "inverted containment unit" with extremely clear written instructions from himself to himself. He knows exactly where he needs to go.
As he moves down the forest road away from the Site, he reaches and crosses the edge of the antimemetic crater. He squares his shoulders, re-entering the presence of SCP-3125. His inner ear starts freefalling again.
"Where were you, just now?" someone calls out to him.
He stops walking. He squints into the intense light ahead of him, shielding his eyes. He can just about make out a figure standing there. The trees on each side of them rustle and move. They're too tall. Spider-scrapers. A wave of dread hits Wheeler, followed closely by one of perverse relief. This is it.
"Why can't I track you?" the unidentified man says. His voice sounds faint. "You're so weak, it's like you don't exist. I just wasted two days trying to pick you up again. What's wrong with you?"
Wheeler says nothing.
The man is closer. He didn't walk, but the distance between them halves, and his voice is easier to hear, though he is still too bright to look at. His body structure blurs and flickers. "You're not one of Them," he says. "And you're not one of Us. And you're definitely not the hero. You don't count for shit, memetically. Why are you wasting your time on this? Whatever the fuck this is. You should just kill yourself. It's not going to work."
Wheeler knows that.
The light collapses. The figure smashes into focus, becoming physical. It's a real human. A skinny twenty-something: scruffy, uncut hair and a sketchy beard. He is shirtless, and there is a deep, black pit in his clavicle, a hole where he has clearly been very badly wounded. Blood has run down his chest, soaked his jeans and forearms, and dried black. Fresh blood is still coming, building up thick layers, which shouldn't be possible. Wheeler doesn't spot the second hole in his gut, obscured by too much blood.
Wheeler is trying to keep his expression neutral, but he knows it isn't working. He can feel his left hand, his bad hand, starting to shake. A part of him still wants to ask the guy why. But there is no possible answer.
"This is what the human race really is," the man explains, spreading his hands to gesture at the whole world. "We lied to ourselves that we could be better, for thousands of years. But this is it. This is what we've always been. We've never been anything else."
"That's—" Wheeler begins, then stops, suddenly remembering something. He claps his left hand to his chest, draws with his right and shoots. It's a good shot. It's a lucky shot. It takes the man directly in the eyeball, and blows out the back of his skull. He falls, twisting as he falls, landing on his broken face.
Wheeler gasps, remembering to breathe. He almost drops his gun. He gets a tighter grip on it, keeping it aimed at the blasted ruin of the man's head. He wants to throw up. He controls himself. In through the mouth, out through the nose. He's okay. "Let him talk for too long," he says, apologetically.
He pulls out a Foundation brickphone from his pack. He pushes some buttons, entering coordinates, and then retreats far down the road. He retains visual contact with the dead man for as long as possible, then turns away and kneels, placing the phone on the road beside him. Following the detailed instructions he found in the control room, he grinds his palms into his eyes and presses his face against the ground. And he says:
"Aeloni zaenorae. Fire."
The orbital laser strike comes diagonally. It lasts for a split second, and is easily bright enough in the visible spectrum to have instantly blinded him if he were looking. When Wheeler returns to the scene, there's no body left. Just a scorched ellipse of asphalt.
He says, to the scorch mark, "I was going to say something along the lines of: 'That's a lie. That's what you are. You're the lie.' But, ah."
And if the bastard can regenerate from that, I'm done for, well and truly.
He looks up. The atmosphere isn't changing. The sky isn't returning to blue. There's still that heinous pressure. SCP-3125 remains the dominant force in the universe.
But as he turns, hearing movement in the forest all around him, he realises that the immense spider forms — he'd sincerely forgotten about them, they were standing there so quietly — are dispersing.

Final chapter: Tombstone


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Numbers don't lie
I've finally decided to make a leap into the Antimemetics Division. Since I first read We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five by qntm back in 2015 I have loved Wheeler and have been determined that, if I ever start writing SCPs again, I'd write an Antimemetic Division story. Well, here I am and here it is.
Thank you also to HammerMaiden for writing such a cool SCP back in '17.
Trivia: An exchange I cut out of this story, because it didn't fit the mood, was Elanor calling the memetic people meeple.
Also: I understand that under the correct circumstances you could get 6 billion people with SCP-2000. It would just involve a lot of forced pairings, underage pregnancies, and other things which I didn't want to include in this tale. So I took some liberties.
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▷ The Transfer
▷ Journeys: The Tale of Dane
▷ Just Enough

"I don't know what to do." The numbers are wrong.
The air was warm. Sticky. Stale. Elanor licked her lips. They were dry. The numbers are wrong.
Marion Wheeler, Chief of the Foundation's Antimemetics Division at Site-41, was nodding very slowly. Staring. It wasn't a look of concern. Not pity, either. The wheels in Elanor's head were clogged, and she couldn't parse Wheeler's expression. Not that it would have much helped had her brain been firing on all four cylinders—Wheeler was particularly disciplined, stoic, and focused constantly… it was kind of unnerving.
Elanor let out a breath. Why did it feel like it was being held in for such a long time? Her lungs burned. She could feel sweat dripping down her face. She reached up to wipe it with the back of her hand, but her face was dry. The numbers are wrong. The numbers are wrong.
The radio was on: it sounded vaguely like Lose Yourself was playing beneath what seemed to be mostly static. Outside, a car horn beeped somewhere. The numbers are wrong.
Wheeler finally spoke. "I understand the transition is difficult. But we both know it makes a lot of sense to have you here." The numbers are wrong.
Elanor's focus seemed to snap into place, and she felt herself relaxing. "I keep having these..episodes." She looked down at her lap, trying to avoid the indecipherable gaze of the Chief. "Things slow down, I feel cold, I feel hot, I realize hours have passed, or basically no time at all. And then something else keeps nagging at me that…" She trailed off. The numbers are wrong.
Wheeler nodded, taking out a small notebook and scribbling something in it. "Your experience in this department is a little unusual, Miss Jacob. But it's why you're here. We expected to have unexpected side-effects. You're in unexplored territory. At least, as far as we know." Wheeler ventured a tiny wry smile. "And not just because you're the first agent I know of who transferred in from Accounting."
Elanor couldn't help but smile. "So these feelings I've been having, are they related to that medication? The mnestics?"
"That depends. Let's see…You've been here six weeks." Wheeler leaned back a little in her chair. "Are you enjoying your job?"
"Actually, yeah, I am. I love handling financial records. I love financial databases." She gave the Chief a knowing look. "See, unlike people, numbers don't lie."
Wheeler nodded, noting something else in her notebook. "Well, the good news is that the episodes of dissociation are normal when you're first adapting to Class W mnestics. The feelings don't really go away, but you get used to them as you realize they're symptoms of experiencing things you literally haven't before."
A wave of relief spread over Elanor, and she instantly felt lighter about the whole matter. It was just, as most antimemetic things tend to be, all in her head.
"However." Any trace of Wheeler's smile was gone.The numbers are wrong.
The wave turned to ice instantly. The young accountant stiffened. The numbers are wrong.
"During your orientation, it was explained that you would be required to carry a pen and notebook on you at all times. Have you?"
Elanor nodded. The numbers are wrong.
"What was the purpose of that notebook?" The numbers are wrong.
"So that if I believe I've been exposed to an antimemetic agent, I can quickly copy down my thoughts and observations before suffering information loss or corruption."
Wheeler nodded, jotting something into her own notebook. "Miss Jacob, this is important. When is the last time you saw that notebook? Have you put anything in it yet?"
Elanor shook her head. "I don't think so. I think it's back at my d—"
"If that's the case," Wheeler said, making another small note in her own book, "your experiences with missing and dissociated episodes might not be as simple as adjusting to mnestics." Her movements were very deliberate now as she set her pen down, not removing her gaze from the young agent across the desk. "I feel I should inform you that during the conversation we have been having, you have stopped mid-sentence to write something in your notebook several times. I have a feeling you might have not realized it."
Elanor chuckled in half-disbelief. "How? My notebook's back at my—" She stopped. It was in her hand. She opened her mouth wordlessly and closed it again. The numbers are wrong.
Wheeler rose from her chair, her face stern and composed. "Elanor, listen to me. I need you to set the notebook down, and slowly open it, but don't look at it until I've cleared it's safe, okay?"
"Oh. Ohhhhkay." Elanor was trembling as she set the book down. Her mind was racing. "Chief, I'm sorry, I—" The numbers are wrong.
"No need to be sorry," was Wheeler's response. "The fact that you're writing in the notebook means you have strong instincts. You're doing just fine." She inhaled deeply through her nose. "Go."
Elanor pulled the cover open and looked up at the ceiling. She stared, transfixed on the plaster, for what seemed like an eternity but might have only been seconds. She could hear Wheeler scribbling. "Okay," Wheeler said gently, "Try and look now."
Slowly, so slowly, she pulled her gaze from the ceiling to look down at the notebook that—up until now—she had thought was empty.
But it was not.
Every page was covered. Elanor's own handwriting was staring back, pristine and perfectionist and immediately recognizable. Every line was filled with the same four words: "The Numbers are wrong."
"Do you know what it means?" Wheeler asked, her voice just above a whisper.
Elanor shook her head. Then turned the pages again and again. The same phrase, over and over.
Wheeler put her own notebook away and gestured to the door. "Then let's go find out."

Elanor drummed her fingers absently on the table. It was nice to be back at her own desk again, but now, with Wheeler there to oversee, it felt incredibly uncomfortable.
"Okay," Wheeler said, sitting down on the other side of Elanor's desk, "Let's do some baseline questions, alright? What's your name?"
"Elanor Jones." The numbers are wrong.
"What's your position, personnel class, and clearance at the Foundation?"
"Accounts specialist, Antimemetics Division, Personnel class C, Security Clearance 2, with elevated clearance for financial documents related to…" She stopped. The notebook was open again and the pen was in her hand. The numbers are wrong.
Wheeler was smiling. "You caught yourself that time. Now focus. There's something there. What were you about to say?"
Elanor shakily put the cap back on her pen. She spoke slowly, and deliberately. "I have. Elevated clearance for. Documents—financial documents. Related to. Department expenditures. And."
The cap was off. Elanor put it back on. The numbers are wrong.
"That's it," Wheeler said encouragingly. "Find what's triggering it. Department expenditures and what?"
The cap was off. Elanor put it back on. The numbers are wrong.
"Department expenditures and what, Elanor?"
"Um." The cap was off. Elanor put it back on. "Department. Expenditures. And." The cap was off. The cap was off. Off. The numbers are wrong.
Wheeler was leaning forward, resting her hands on the desk. "Breathe. Focus."
"And." The cap was off. Elanor's fingers trembled. And then—she hurled the pen across the room. "Payroll!" THE. NUMBERS. ARE. WRONG.
There was a stillness to the room as the plastic utensil clattered to the ground. Elanor was breathing hard. Her heart was pounding.
"OK," Wheeler said, nodding. "Tell me."
Somehow, Elanor had caught hold of the metaphorical thing clawing in the back of her mind, desperately trying again to escape behind the curtain. She had a hold of it now. Why couldn't she stop shaking? "You asked for me to transfer to this department to see if there were any attempts by Foundation employees, departments, or potential insurgents to mismanage funds and cover their tracks with antimemes." Her breathing was getting faster. "The Foundation allots a certain amount of money for payroll based on the salary of Foundation agents. So, per your instructions, I have been auditing individual department budgets. But there's something here, in the numbers. Something that makes my eyes just pass over it. We're…We're…" She tried to formulate the idea in her head now. The information trying to crawl away inside her mind was now being molded like putty in the accountant's frontal lobe.
"You've almost got it," Wheeler said, reaching over to take Elanor's hand. Elanor paid her no mind—not to be rude, but the runaway idea was still trying to make its escape. She had secured her hold on it now, though. She melded it, kneaded it between a perception and a process and an ingrained mathematical mind, and then, like the bursting of a dam, the idea gave way.
She straightened up. "Departments are paying on average 70% less for salaries than they should be." On Elanor's left, a stack of 11x17 spreadsheets leered up at her. Why hadn't she noticed them before? She picked it up. "But it's not that people are having pay cuts. But it's something else. They…" She tried to find the words. "It's that they…there's something wrong with the people. With the names. They're…They're not names. They're…"
Wheeler was now looking over her shoulder at the spreadsheets. "Oh my god. It's mipsum."
Elanor shrugged. "I don't understand."
The chief ran a finger over the text in one of the rows on the sheet. "It's a cognitive defense mechanism that makes you not realize data is missing. In graphic design, placeholder text is called 'lipsum'. When it's anti-memetic, we call it 'mipsum'. Memetic placeholder text. Glyphs that are so much like real text that your whole perception just passes over it. Except," She added with an approving side glance, "Yours didn't." She flipped through a few pages. "Wow. Over half the names. maybe 3 out of 4. What department is this?"
"This one's waste disposal. Let's see, I also have…" She pulled out several more stacks of 11x17. "Fire Services, Ops-A, Ops-B, and…oh." The text on the next one read "Antimemetics Division."
Wheeler took it and began flipping through it. "I don't understand. Antimemetics has a staff of eight thousand people. Two thirds of them can't just be—" She stopped, her face going blank as her gaze rested on an opposite wall.
Elanor waited, and then gently tapped her. "Chief?"
Wheeler looked mildly startled. She dropped the spreadsheet on the floor and dashed to the office door. Just outside, department staffers were hard at work in offices and cubicles. Shuffling papers, transcribing notes, rewriting lost communications for the 10th or 20th time.
Elanor was at her side. "What is it?"
"Look," Wheeler said.
Elanor looked around. "I don't…I don't see what you're—"
"Count," Wheeler said, her voice barely a breath. "Count the number of people you can see from this doorway."
Elanor mentally tallied them up. "Uh. Twenty-two." The numbers are wrong.
Wheeler shook her head. "Again. Count again."
She did. "Twenty-two."
"Again. Focus. Count in your head."
Elanor gritted her teeth. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. E— No. Not eight. Just seven. Only seven people were actually in the room. She sucked in a breath. "Oh my god."
Wheeler was glowering. Elanor could almost see the wheels spinning behind her glasses, and it was a moment before the Chief returned to reality. "Ok. I think I know our next step."
Elanor felt suddenly ready for anything. "Ok. Who are we going to talk to?"
"No one." Wheeler gestured for the accountant to follow. "I think we already did."

The computer screen was facing the other direction, but whatever was on it cast Wheeler into sharp relief. She looked somehow older now—tired, stretched to her limits.
"My god," Wheeler said, leaning back from the monitor. "Box F. Box F." She rose, went to a cabinet, and removed a small green box about the size of a coffee mug. She returned to her desk and sat, placing the box in front of her. "Alright Elanor, the information you're about to receive is highly confidential and may distress you. But if it's any consolation, the access logs in here lead me to believe that you and I have discussed this before."
Elanor nodded and said nothing.
"This," Wheeler said, turning her computer monitor, "Is SCP-2000. It's alright, apparently you already have clearance to read this file. I wonder how that happened."
Elanor took the mouse and started to scroll through its contents section by section. Her face went from curiosity to horror and back again in the short span of a few minutes. When she'd reached the bottom of the page, she had become pale in the fading afternoon light. Sinking back in her chair, the young agent sat quietly for a long time, simply contemplating what she had just read. Wheeler rose and walked to the break room to make two cups of tea, one of which was placed in front of her colleague, who had still not moved.
Elanor's eyes went suddenly wide and she grabbed the mouse to scroll up. "Wait—"

To fulfill its primary mission, SCP-2000 includes 500,000 Bright/Zartion Hominid Replicators (BZHR). At peak capacity, SCP-2000 is capable of producing 100,000 viable, non-anomalous humans per day (with a warm-up period of 5 days).

She pointed at the screen and looked over at Wheeler without saying a word. Wheeler nodded, taking a sip of her tea. Elanor scrolled back down to the bottom of the description.

It is estimated that the world population, manufacturing capability, agricultural production, and culture can be reset to 2000 CE levels 25 to 50 yrs after the procedure is implemented.

Elanor pointed again, still unable to make any words. She grabbed for a pen and notebook.
The Chief stopped her. "No, I understand. It doesn't add up. The population of the world in 2000 was 6.2 billion people. At 100,000 people a day, for even 50 years…accounting for birth rates and death rates, you come up short. Far too short." She took another sip of tea. "About two in three short. A population loss of about 70%."
Elanor had not yet found her voice, but she tried. "Where are they?" she whispered.
Wheeler tapped a phrase on the screen with the back of her pen.

the BZHR also has the ability to implant memories by administration of Class-G hallucinogenics and developmental hypnotherapy.

"Class-G hallucinogenics. I'm familiar with these," she explained. "They're not in your standard amnestics and mnestics guide. This isn't just a memory-eraser. It's a memory-replacer. It's made of anomalous material that makes it as permanent as possible. The memories bind to your brain and don't let go." She let out a hiss between her teeth. "They should have told me about this."
"So what does that mean?" Elanor whispered. She was trembling again.
The chief didn't meet Elanor's gaze. "It means that the last time the Lazarus Protocol was used, they only made 2 billion people out of 6. Everyone else is just implanted in our conscious." She took in a deep breath. "On the streets. In restaurants. On the train. In your office. Two out of three just aren't real…they're in our heads, to make our planet feel a little less empty."
"But why?"
Wheeler had no answer.
A long silence descended between them. "And in there?" She gestured to the green cube labeled "Box F", already suspecting the answer.
Wheeler removed the lid. Inside were two medical inhalers, each with a bright green label. One read WHEELER, M and the other JONES, E.
"Class-G," Wheeler mumbled. Drugs strong enough to make you forget. Drugs strong enough to overpower Mnestics. Drugs strong enough to override a living being permanently. Well, not permanently, Wheeler reminded herself. Elanor had beaten it. Elanor and the numbers.
Elanor picked the one with her own name. "I've done this before, haven't I?"
Wheeler pulled the other one from the box. "I think we both have."
The accountant paused again. "And…I have to?"
The chief met Elanor's gaze. It was an expression of regret, hopelessness, and a profound sense of duty, broiled together with a suppressed instinct—that innate fear of not knowing. "I won't make you," Wheeler said, and there was a depth of calm to her voice. "I can't stop someone higher than me from giving it to you later against your will. Maybe that's what happened last time. No way to know. But…" She finally broke her gaze, looking out the office window at the setting sun and the massive stone monument in the forest behind Site-41. "I also wouldn't judge you for choosing to live a different, less unsettling, truth."
Elanor rattled the inhaler. "It's not a truth. Numbers don't lie."
The tea had gone cold by the time they had both made their decision.
The numbers are wrong.