 Training Document, Zeta-0-9a-1-3 On 19 May 2023, Mobile Task Force Delta V, codename Line of Sight, encountered a civilian under the influence of a Class II Psycho-Parasitic Infiltrator, designated SCP-643-4. Nine members of the Task Force were killed in action in the struggle, leaving Delta V III as a sole survivor. Eighteen nearby civilians were subsequently killed by SCP-643-4, before toast succumbed to injuries sustained in its engagement with Mobile Task Force Delta V. During debrief, Delta V III requested to be transferred to Mobile Task Force Zeta-0, codename Monsters. The following document was produced by Delta V III, now designated Zeta-01, three days into the Zeta-0 psychological reconditioning process. Accordingly, it has been entered into the Zeta-0 training archive. This document is mandatory reading material for all Mobile Task Force Zeta-0 trainees. You are now instructed to read the text in its entirety. In the course of your reconditioning, you will be asked to produce similar documents, all of which shall be shared among your teammates. You have all suffered, and the suffering cannot be simply put aside. You will learn from each other, and together you will be transformed. There are no secrets in Mobile Task Force Zeta-0. In the Second World War, only 15% of Allied soldiers fired their weapons. The theory goes, nobody wants to kill. Nobody wants to look down the barrel and see another human being die because of what you did, because of your finger on the trigger, because you made a decision and somebody died. Somebody died and you saw him fall, and the report from your gun was still shattering your ears when he hit the mud. You smelled the cordite and piss that marked the end of a life, and then you move forward. The soldier on your left did not move with you, because the man you had killed had a friend who had a gun who had a bullet. The bullet was moving downrange fast, then, on a comets trail of blood and brain tissue and bone fragments, and then you move forward and the soldier on your left did not. Nobody wants this. So they changed up the training. They made all sorts of clever tweaks. Human-shaped targets instead of bullseyes, emphasis on the moral culpability of commanding officers, camaraderie, propaganda, team-building, a rigid, formal structure designed to break down human and rebuild soldier. They realized that it was about your frame of mind, and there were ways to change your mind. It worked. In the Vietnam War, up to 90% of American soldiers fired their weapons. None of that is true. The data from World War II was falsified. The fighting was brutal and bloody and fierce. Everybody fired a gun, because anybody who didn't shoot first would get shot, and then anybody was nobody, and all that was left was everybody. The tweaks they made to basic training between the wars were minor at best, and while they might have done a good job at turning teenagers into halfway-decent marksmen, the psychological burden was much the same. Nobody wants to kill, sure, but it's always been very, very easy to persuade them to do it anyway. But human-shaped targets were a clever idea. Large swaths of the foundation were born out of the United States military. These days, a lot of task force leaders cut their teeth on Afghanistan before they get their end trails eaten by something with too many vertices to fit comfortably in baseline reality. At least 205s used to be generals or admirals, back in World War Redacted. Entire research teams were scooped out of the Manhattan Project, and paperclip, and other weirder groups with black money and no supervision. A surprising amount of the foundation's occult science started out in ARPA, pharmacology too. You can thank the Air Force for some of the earliest amnestics. In the end, psychology was the biggest and best thing to make its way from the U.S. military into the foundation. Paper targets shaped like paper people became full VR simulation, complete with neural taps and a dizzying cocktail of amphetamine and irreality drugs injected right into the vein. Team-building exercises get their lethal edge. Mock executions, usually mock. The foundation shapes you to hyper-specialize in one thing, psionic warfare, chemical weapons, reality anchoring, dreamscape navigation, microgravity, sensory deprivation, afterlife exfiltration. They take your mind and mold you into a blade, scalpel or sword or both. They'll modify your body too, of course. Brain implants, skeletal reinforcement, muscle growth, new organs, or missing organs are all of the above. But beyond anything else, the mind shaping that goes on here is exquisitely exact. Military precision. Sometimes the training isn't right. Sometimes that specialization is not conducive to an optimal outcome for the mission. You lost your entire task force and the anomaly escaped into the general population. 18 civilians dead, another 100 amnesticized across the sleepy suburb, tens of millions of dollars lost. Its silver teeth tore a bloody swamp through your squad. It chewed its way through their flesh, then it got to work on the neighbors. You were schooled in close quarters combat and four plus dimensional topologies. Your eyeballs modified to see shades of light that have never existed. But your mobile task force was cut down by, you weren't trained for that. Sometimes what you need to train is as simple as your attitude. Sometimes you just need to learn to enter the right frame of mind. That's what Zeta Zero is for, isn't it? A shift in perspective, a new attitude, a wrong attitude that will become correct. Listen. Only 15% of soldiers in World War II fired their weapons. Intensive, extensive overhauls to basic training raised that number to 90% in Vietnam. The data gathered from years of meticulous psychological research allowed the United States military to train ordinary young men and women into killers. It was hard. Nobody wants to kill. And it's very, very difficult to persuade them to do it. Listen. In World War II, the fighting was hot and bloody. People killed with bullets and bayonets and bombs. They fought with the desperation born out of fear or patriotism or both. And they did not hesitate. Put a teenager in a righteous life for death situation and he'll choose quickly. Listen. The lives of the innocent are precious above all others. Listen. The lives of your squad mates are precious above all others. Listen. Secure, contain, protect. Listen. It's all about your frame of mind. If your new reality doesn't fit within that frame, ask them to break it down and build you a new one. Don't do it for the greater good. The greater good is for people who don't have to pull the trigger. You're here for yourself. You're here for your own pain. Listen. Lead your squad into that quiet suburban house. Kick down the door. Sweep the corners. Clear the living room, kitchen, two bodies on the staircase. Check for vital signs. Looks like the homeowners. Both things sanguinated. Go upstairs, third door on the left. Thomic levels are off the charts. The entity's got to be in there. On the count of three, Morgan ignores the magic marker warning to keep out and he goes in. You follow. You see the entity. It looks just like the doe-eyed little girl in the family photograph on the fridge. 12 years old and finishing the seventh grade in two weeks. It's screaming, clutching a teddy bear. Blood still dripping from its chin. What's happening? Where's mom? Mom. I'm so hungry. And it cries in lunges and its teeth aren't sharp at all. Just a normal child's mouth with bloody spittle trailing off silver braces. It's going for Morgan's jugular. And here's the only question that matters. How do you train a man to kill children? Do you make him numb to it? Drugs, simulations, subliminal messages, clockwork oranges, eyelids, and beam loyalty directly into his brain. Just killed child after child in his dreams and daydreams until it comes no different than killing a man, which after all is no different than shooting a paper target? Nobody wants this. Or at least anybody who does should on no account be allowed to do it. You can't hire a child killer to kill children. You have to make one. Then you make 10 more of them and put them in uniforms and call them a task force. Monsters, we call ourselves that to remind us this is not good, greater or lesser. Anybody who wants to die in the dark to preserve the life should be immediately taken out back and shot. Because the only thing worse than a monster is the greater good. You're here for you and you alone. And don't you dare believe otherwise. It's May 19th, 2023. And you kick down the door and climb the stairs to secure a container protect. The bites on the parent's neck match the bloody teeth and panic dies of a little girl burning with a parasitic hunger she can't ever Satan doesn't have time to understand. There's always a choice. Nobody wants this. That's the most important part. It's all about your frame of mind.