 Junior researcher Kim has been working for the foundation for all of four hours and he feels pulverized as if an anvil had dropped on his head in that first introductory lecture. It's lunchtime and he's found a corner so far back in the cafeteria that nobody bothers him or he can chew and swallow non-anomalous food, drink apocalyptically strong coffee and digest the hard lessons of the morning. On his foundation-provided phone, he pages fretfully through the few SCP files for which he has clearance. Most of them have to be jokes. That's how they read. Like very bad, dark, frightening jokes. Kim's one of 11 junior researchers in the new intake and the other 10 are sitting in a separate group at a separate table, chatting animatedly to one another. There are some instructors here and there, munching sandwiches. Other than them, the cafeteria, large enough to seat 200 people or more, is deserted. To Kim, that seems odd. Site 41 is large, three skulking buildings with significant basement space, buried casually in the forest of central Colorado. Where is everybody? A man in a gray suit walks into the cafeteria, makes eye contact with Kim and strides purposefully over. The man's suit is sharp enough to cut. He wears a tie pin and a platinum wristwatch as big as a brick. He looks badly misplaced. Site 41 is a working site. There's training, education, research, development, analysis, and even the containment of a very few safe SCPs going on here. Executives shouldn't ever be here. So what is he? A lost exec trying to find the helipad? Or a researcher or instructor dressing for the job he wants, not the job he has? While of a first day, the man says, holding at hand, Alistair Gray with an E. Kim says Kim, Paul Kim, good to meet you. What accent is that if you don't mind me asking? Kim blinks. New York, he says. I'm from New York. Are you the site director? You see one edge. Well, that figures doesn't it? Kim asks. You must know how that intro goes, it's like an atom bomb to the ego. I just had almost everything I know overturned. It turns out I spent my entire adult life being protected from dangerous knowledge as if the whole outside world is a ball pit for under sevens. Stepping out of that has been humiliating to start with. And he blinks again. Hey, what do you do here exactly? He didn't answer my question. You didn't answer mine. Gray says. Of course I did. Kim says. I'm from. And then he just stops his train of thought running off the end of the track into air. It's on the tip of his tongue. The answer to Gray's question, but he can't get the words out. That's weird. He says, shaking his head at this point. He also notices that Gray isn't wearing his badge. This could be an honest mistake, albeit an extremely serious one. But surely execs don't get to the executive level without being scrupulously correct in everything they do. Who are you? Kim asks again. Your life story was fascinating. What? You spoke four languages. Gray tells him. One now and soon zero. Too huge an intellect to specialize. Your education was a fusion of biochemistry and comparative literature. You felt as if you'd die if you couldn't find more foreign thoughts to cram into your head. You've been all over the world. Hungry in every country you've ever been to was like landing on another planet. You toy with anthropology, but there's too much world for one human race to ever understand, let alone one human. There's too much human race. We should pare it down. Kim nods. Would you excuse me for just one second? He gets up and hurries to another table to the instructor whom he met earlier that day. Kim gets close to her. He feels a kind of static sensation building up. He tries to shake her shoulder and succeeds in moving it a little, but it's like reaching through tar. Hey, there's a problem. There's an intruder. I think it might be an SCP. Doc, look at me. Hello? She doesn't react. He tries the gaggle of fellow newcomers as well, but they keep chattering and hypothesizing, oblivious to him shouting and clapping in their ears. Hey, people. Listen to me. No, no, no, no. He looks back. Gray has stood up and started moving towards him, still with that confident smile. And there's definitely something wrong with him now, because he's visible through the tables like an augmented reality holler projection jammed inside Kim's eyeball. Kim realizes with a stab of fear that he can even see gray when he blinks. His eyelids close, but gray's still there. The apparition in one for all of Kim's life has been totally personal, private darkness. The only way he can avoid seeing gray is to turn away, and even then, he feels a radioactive prickling in the back of his eyeballs. Kim tries to phone one of the newbies. The phone in newbies pocket rings, and other than that, nothing happens. Nobody reacts. That doesn't make sense, Kim says. Do you remember your father? Gray says. I never knew my father, Kim says, edging away. Mom raised me. Gray's white smile is a fixture. These people loved your perspective. They were going to put you to work on anomalous antememes. But they don't remember you exist. You don't exist. Kim says mainly to himself, there aren't any dangerous ACPs on this site. It's a safe site. So either you're not dangerous, or nobody knows you exist. And if nobody knows you exist, then that means you're either brand new, or you're, what's an antememe? Hell of a first day, Gray says. Are you sentient? Kim asks. You seem on edge, Gray says. Kim bolts. He exits the cafeteria, turns the corner, and runs ten or eleven paces down the corridor to where there's an elevator. He stabs the down button and waits. The elevator door is highly polished, reflective. Kim catches sight of a face in the mirrored surface, and nearly falls over with shock. Because it's a face she has never seen before, and it's apparently his own. Jesus. Oh no. No, no. He babbles. What the hell? What the hell? Gray comes around the corner, still only strolling, just as the elevator cracks open. Kim dives in and punches the lowest floor, base button level eight. It's instinctive, although he could rationalize the decision in retrospect. He can't just get in his car and drive. It's better if Gray stays on site than if he's set loose in rational reality. And to do that, it's better if Kim retreats to the lowest, darkest corner of the site for which he has access, and then waits for Gray and then locks all the doors behind them, and waits to die. The elevator starts descending, and the apparition of Gray, visible through the doors and floors, disappears upwards, shrinking with distance and perspective, but still smiling broadly down at Kim. Kim paces in the elevator, and I don't remember what my face looks like. It said it had eaten all my secondary languages, but I don't remember learning anything other than English, so it's eating my memories. It's consuming information, and I can't contact anybody directly, which means I'm on my own. I'm not trained for this. He hammers his head once against the elevator wall, and stares at his shoes. But don't know that. What if I've been trained, but I don't remember my training anymore? What if I've been working here for years, and I only think this is my first day? What if I've met this thing before? What if everybody on site has met it multiple times, and nobody remembers? Is that what an anti-meme is? Kim remembers the near-empty cafeteria, and miles of totally unoccupied corridors, and vacant office and lab space. Maybe it's not just eating my memories. Maybe it eats people whole, removes them completely from history. Maybe it's been haunting the site for years, and that's why the site's so empty, because it's nearly finished exterminating us all. I need to get help. I need to warn somebody. How? I can't talk to people. I can't phone them. I should write an SCP, but surely someone's already thought of that. He pulls his phone out. He pulls out the listing. Nearly 10,000 SCP entries. A hundred of them are tagged anti-mimetics alone. Kim clears his mind. Gray with an E. G-R-E-Y. 4-7-3-9. SCP-4739. Object Class. Keter. Special Containment Procedures. I'm disregarding the format because time is a factor. If you're reading this, you've already been isolated from the Foundation at large. Attempts to sign for help are futile. You are now inside 4739's gullet after ingestion and prior to digestion. You need to get to lab S041B08053 as soon as possible and continue the research until you find a way to stop or kill Gray before it kills you. Don't wait the rest until you're in the elevator. Description. At that moment, the elevator doors open at basement level 8. Alistair Gray is waiting, still smiling, disarmingly. He steps forward. Desperate. Kim hurls his phone overarm at the creature's forehead. It's a solid chunk of metal and it's a dead hit. Gray reels backwards and cracks his skull against the wall. By the time he recovers, Kim is out of sight, herring away down the left corridor just echoing fading footsteps on concrete. 2 45-degree turns and room 53 is in sight, the door at the farthest end. It looks like a submarine bulkhead. Kim is supposed to keypad from way out. Four digits. He tries 4739 and it works the first time. The bulkhead mechanism takes agonizing seconds to open up. Come on, come on, come on. Do you remember your mother? He hears Gray calling down the corridor. I never knew my parents. I was an orphan. Kim hisses under his breath. For a split second, he wonders what Gray might really mean by that, but he doesn't have time to dwell on it. The bulkhead opens. Kim slides in and pulls it closed behind him, locking the mechanism up again, as if that will buy him even one second. The lab inside is sizable, windowless of course, and stacked to the ceiling with a jumble of equipment which Kim hardly recognizes. There are pieces of thick shattered glass underfoot. In the corner, there's a computer terminal locked. Kim unlocks it and there's the same entry waiting for him. Description. SCP 4739 is a powerful, slow-acting, anti-mimetic kill agent, taking the appearance of a male Caucasian business executive calling itself Alster Gray. SCP 4739 is attracted to dense clusters of organically stored information, essentially extremely knowledgeable, complicated, interesting people. SCP 4739 isolates its victims from the outside world by enveloping them in an anti-mimetic field which makes it impossible for the victim, or anything done by the victim, to be perceived or remembered. SCP 4739 then consumes the victim's memories and knowledge until they become vegetative and die. This process takes between 15 minutes and 2 hours, and is described as being like Alzheimer's disease in Fast Forward. SCP 4739 is not believed to be sentient, although it imitates the behavior of a sentient being to the extent that it can appear sentient to the inattentive. Its victims are able to move and act freely, since it is impossible to escape one's caught or to signal for help. Communications such as written notes, graffiti, and electronic mail do get sent and persist in reality, but SCP 4739's effect spread with each message, making it impossible for an external observer to receive the message, until such time as SCP 4739 catches them too. The SCP entry which you are currently reading is created and maintained by victims of SCP 4739, because it is only visible to victims of SCP 4739. If you are reading this SCP entry, SCP 4739 has caught you. You are now isolated from the Foundation at large and constitute an effective Foundation of one. You have between 15 minutes and 2 hours to reach Site 41, Basement Level 8, Laboratory 053. Familiarize yourself with the existing research and continuous research, until you find a way to contain or decommission SCP 4739 or more likely die. If your field of expertise is not related to anti-mimetic containment, we sincerely apologize and advise you to start learning fast. SCP 4739 has consumed 79 Foundation researchers since we started counting on August 3rd, 2013. If you are reading this entry for the first time, please add a mark. We estimate at least 50% of the victims never make it as far as this database entry, so the true victim count is more than twice this figure. But how do I kill it? Kim screams. He scrolls and scrolls through the research, which is chaotic and haphazardly arranged because nobody has found the spare seconds to sort it out. There are dozens of separate lines of research contributed in patchwork by a succession of victims, all ending with variations on the same final line. I'm gonna try X. If you're reading this, X didn't work and I'm dead, which means approach X is a dead end and you'll have to think of something else. He reads, Nobody has succeeded in physically engaging with Gray. Maybe you can still it, evade it, slow it down, reason with it, or redirect it to some other target. People have tried poisoning their memories with indigestible ideas, drip feeding the memories too great to slow them down, replacing the memories faster than Gray can eat them, and force feeding Gray too many memories at once to overfeed them and blow them up. They've tried committing suicide by Class A amnestic overdose. None of it worked. More than a hundred people, most of them apparently possessing doctorates, have slid into the maw of this thing, fought briefly and, with a greater or lesser degree of dignity, died. There are no remaining untried threats. I'm f***ed, Kim concludes. He glances up. Gray's not in the room yet, but Kim can see him strolling down the last stretch of corridor. He's a totally intangible being. Physical obstructions are irrelevant to him. He can't be hurt. Kim clutches the pocket where he used to keep his phone. Wait a second. He scrolls again. He finds three or four sad desperate wretches who tried confronting Gray physically. Combat knife and a glock. Baseball bat. Kim looks up and checks the room. Sure enough, the bat's there, rolled under a table. One man, an elderly botanist far out of his death, said he was going to try what every could find that was heaviest. One explains the shattered CRT television and a light layer of thick glass on the floor near the bulkhead. There's even CCTV footage of the botanist's attempt. He accomplishes literally nothing. Gray is a holographic ghost and the CRT drops right through him, imploding when it hits the floor at Gray's feet. The botanist spends the rest of the video's running time, huddled in a corner, gradually losing his mind while Gray watches, placidly. The difference being, Kim realizes with his eyes boggling, a phone is a solid brick full of information and before me, nobody tried using information as a missile. Kim searches for the experiments, several of them, scattered, where the victim tried to divert Gray to a different data source. The general idea seemed to be to overload Gray by pointing him at something containing too much information. The internet or the terabit feed from a live particle accelerator experiment or a stack of hard drives containing the first few quadrillion binary digits of pi, but nobody could figure out a way to distract Gray's attention, prominently placed screens full of data he would ignore. Data beamed at him electromagnetically, radio, laser, had no effect and nobody could figure out a way to tunnel the information into the victim's mind as extra memories. It was written off as impossible, closed as a line of investigation. The hard drives confines are right there in the workbench, next to the computer. It's a half-wracked unit, a cuboidal block of metalwork as big and heavy as a bowling ball, one of the most ineffective, conceivable melee weapons. Kim snatches up the three longest pieces of ethernet cable he can find and starts plotting them into a chain. Then he remembers who he is and where he is and what his responsibilities are. He goes to the computer, to the SCP entry, adds himself to the victim telly and writes up exactly what it is he's about to try, because he might not be the last one and the world needs to know that this didn't work. Gray comes to the lab bulkhead to find most of the equipment in the room toppled onto the floor to create room for the black and silver driver ray that Paul Kim is whirling around his head on a two-meter chain made of planted network cable. It makes a low-thirming sound as it whirls. Gray is not intelligent enough to stop moving forwards and catches the array directly in the side of his head, rack mount point first, like a morning star. Gray absorbs a few trillion digits of the impact but it isn't enough. There's a green snap of light and a noise like a subway train short-circuiting and Gray's a pile in the corner. His head caved in and the driver ray partially demolished in pieces around him. Kim decides that history can fill in whatever quip it likes best. It was chewing its way up the anti-mimetic division hierarchy, Wheeler tells him in the aftermath. It was only a matter of time until it bit down on somebody dangerous. Congratulations on demonstrating a basic level of confidence when it counted. Dozens of others couldn't. Kim still feels rattled but the shock is dissipating faster than expected. Marion Wheeler it turns out is the anti-mimetic division chief. She is Kim's new boss. I want to say it was dumb luck Kim says. I want to say that I just threw my phone. It was instinct. It was muscle memory. It was my first day and I got lucky as hell. I want to say those things but I'm sitting here and turning those statements over and none of them would be true. What they? Wheeler waits expectantly and says nothing. You're not my new boss Kim says. You're just my boss. This isn't my first day at all. I've been working here for well it must have been over a decade right? I think I've been a professional anti-medics researcher since at least the mid-2000s. It's just that the first thing Gray ate were the memories of everything past the first day and even then. I see very little luck in what happened today Wheeler says. Instinct and muscle memory are just deep forms of training. Like I said a basic level of competence. An ability to peace your own life and all of your past knowledge back together faster than nearly anybody else. This is what we tried to drill into you and sometimes thankfully it takes. This isn't even the first time we've had this conversation Kim continues. There have been other incidents with other SCPs with amnestic powers. You sat there and watched me put myself back together before and it hasn't gotten old yet. Wheeler admits it's something which might be approaching a smirk. How long does it usually take for me to recover? A few months Wheeler says but if you want the honest truth people in this division are as competent on day one as they'll ever be. You come to the job firing on cylinders or not at all. The rest is just fine-tuning and chemistry. So what you're actually saying is you don't care about my mental state and you need me back at work now Kim says. Wheeler nods. I need an updated SCP entry just to begin with. I need you to nail down the model for Gray's predatory pattern and exactly how you defeated it. I want you to work out what it did with the bodies incinerated disintegrated or just left them lying around the site in rotting perceptually cloaked heaps and I need countermeasures for when it comes back. It's not dead? Wait Kim says. I think I know this one. It's coming back to me. Ideas don't die. And a file. To learn more about the SCP foundation subscribe to SCP orientation today and turn the notification bell on so you don't miss any of our videos.