 If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980. Welcome to the Foundation. This is Episode 001. Since this is a brand new podcast, I feel like you deserve a bit of an explanation for what I'm doing here. I'll be doing a deep dive on a particular topic from the SCP Foundation. Episode 1 will, perhaps appropriately, discuss SCP-001. As of this broadcast, there are 17 different proposals for SCP-001. They range from The Guardian of the Gates of Eden to a simple collection of documents detailing various anomalous objects. The concept of multiple possible SCP-001s at its core reflects a basic fact of necessity with regards to a collaborative writing site. There is no canon. The proposal list. The following files have been classified top secret by order of the administrator. General notice 001-alpha. In order to prevent knowledge of SCP-001 from being leaked, several false SCP-001 files have been created alongside the true file or files. All files concerning the nature of SCP-001, including the decoy or decoys, are protected by a memetic kill agent designed to immediately cause cardiac arrest in any non-authorized personnel attempting to access the file. Revealing the true nature or natures of SCP-001 to the general public is cause for execution. Any non-authorized personnel accessing this file will be immediately terminated through Barryman-Langford memetic kill agent. Scrolling down without proper memetic inoculation will result in immediate cardiac arrest followed by death. You have been warned. For those of you who take the site a little too seriously and who are worried about a medic kill agent, I'm looking at the image right now and I'm perfectly fine. So scroll down a bit further and you'll come across the list of possible 001s. In the earliest days of the site there were just two. Jonathan Ball and Dr. Gears proposal. The chief of papers and the prototype. The chief of papers is a set of documents which detail various SCPs. As the papers are read new objects appear in the world. Read it again and a new object is detailed and appears in the world. This is one of the earlier examples of meta-fiction and SCP foundation writings. It essentially creates an underpinning for the world based around the documents themselves. If you consider this as your 001 then the act of writing an SCP on the site could be said to be the act which creates the object. It's circular but it's simple. It doesn't really explore the concept in any serious way leaving it instead to the reader to understand the implications. In that way it's reflective of the time in which it was written nearly a decade ago. The prototype true to its name faces the same problem in an even more basic way. It's a prototype document with the information delivered in a non-standard and essentially primitive format. When it was written what you've come to expect as an SCP articles format wasn't set in stone. Most importantly the article describes a generic monster. There's no real narrative structure or deeper meaning. It's a monster that eats people and for those reasons and more it's one of the lowest rated OO proposals on the site despite having nearly a decade to generate uploads. Now I'm not going to go over each of the remaining proposals in any kind of depth. I don't have the time. You don't have the attention. Instead we're going to discuss a couple of the more popular ones and one which is my own personal favorite. The Gate Guardian by Dr. Clef is one of the most popular O01 proposals. It's also the third in order. The Gate Guardian is one of the first site dalliances with the end of the world. The object is at its most basic level the entity that guards the gates of the Garden of Eden. The story of the Garden joins together Babylonians, Sumerians and Abrahamic myths and gives the piece a bit of weight. While it's mostly based around the version described in the Book of Genesis the piece itself pays lip service to the earlier Babylonian texts upon which the Biblical Genesis account is based. The piece shows the foundation attempting to examine and eventually destroy the Guardian. It gives it credit for the Indian Ocean tsunami and sends both Cain and Abel to interact with it. Heavy expungement makes it hard to really understand everything going on up to that point, but it's generally assumed to be bad. Then comes the crux of the piece, the end of the world. The foundation receives a message from itself. Initiate emergency procedure Patoce Omega. Attention all foundation personnel. SCP-001 is left at its location. The gate is open. They are riding forth. The Lord reigns. The Lord has reigned. The Lord shall reign forever. The Lord he is God. The Lord he is God. The Lord he is God. Here, O Israel, the Lord are God. The Lord is one. Because of this events confluence with the recent breach of SCP-995, the opening of SCP-616 and the activation of SCP-098. The foundation is required to immediately begin preparations for an XK class end of the world scenario. SCP-076 and SCP-073 are to be secured immediately. All personnel are to unlock and decode emergency order Patoce Omega and follow all orders within. Site-19 is to be secured and all non-essential SCPs and personnel terminated and or destroyed. Repeat, SCP-076 and SCP-073 are to be secured immediately. Cain enable my two sons. I am coming. All personnel are to unlock and decode. Behold, I stand at the gate and knock. Signal lost. The piece ends by communicating to the reader that none of this has happened yet. All the details, the breaches, the activations. None have actually occurred. The time stamp on the message is from the future. This helps build dread in the reader and, most importantly, gives the illusion that this could be their own reality. Maybe the foundation is real and in the background. And this will be how the world ends. Kate McTerris' Proposal SCP-001 is a vinyl record containing Esquivel's 1958 album Exploring New Sounds in Stereo. The album has an anomalous impact on digital numerical lists that contain it. The album, when listed in text saved digitally, will always be listed first, even if it was intended to be listed in another position. Often the best way to explore a concept is to avoid overcomplication. Kate McTerris' Proposal takes a simple concept and explores the extremes it can bring about. In this proposal, anything listed in the 001 slot becomes objectively true. But the writer of the passage you just heard doesn't know that. All they know is they've got this album that will automatically move itself to the number one slot. It's barely serious enough on its own to merit a listing. The document writer creates it and it moves itself to the number one slot automatically. And nothing changes because everything in the document was already true. The article slowly evolves from there because the first iteration contains a typo. It's fixed, but nothing serious comes of it. Then April 1st comes. Our intrepid document writer decides to play a short prank and edits in that level two researchers at the site are to give her $5. She has no expectation that this will occur, but it does. Three hours later she edits it back out as one might do in this situation when they freak out and realize that people are just giving her $5 for no reason. Then later that night she tests something. She adds a line saying her desk nameplate is green and it turns green. Now she understands what she can do with this power and no one else has noticed. The next day she edits in her availability will be limited over the next week due to the paid vacation she's been granted and she takes a week off. When she returns she edits it again making yourself co-director of the site. Let's stop for a moment and examine the basic escalation here. A normal person wouldn't immediately know what the best idea for using such a power would be. So this character fools around with it a little bit. In a sense you imagine she still doesn't believe it, but it keeps working. This has the added benefit of keeping the reader engaged while also being an example of making your character behave like a real person. But by now Mary Nakayama knows and the last edit she makes changes things significantly. Mary Nakayama immediately after the saving of this document will attain omnipotence and omniscience rising to and becoming Godhead. She will spend all time and have complete dominion over this universe and this reality. Everything, everything under everything and everything over everything will be at her command. She will gain all necessary mental faculties to process and utilize these abilities while maintaining uninterrupted consciousness. Members of the O5 council will receive a note indicating the nature of SCP-001. Her family will receive a note indicating her love for them. This is an oddly brilliant place to arrive at from an original object that simply moves itself to the number one position. Through very small edits, we've gotten to know this character in depth, but we have no real closure. We need to understand what the consequences of this action are. The piece's emotional punch comes in a simple note. When I was fifteen, I took enough pills to kill someone four times my size, down with an entire bottle of cheap vodka that was the only thing I had left from the man who used me and left me broken and alone. I sat in my shower with the hot water scalding me and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was dry, I was well, I was in bed. At the door, a shining figure, a radiant light hovered. It spoke to me with a voice that echoed in my mind only. It said, I had greater things to do. I never saw it again, but I kept going. I believed that God descended and saved me, and joining the foundation, how could I not believe? What else could explain the fact that we were still here, still marvelously, desperately, screamingly alive? How else could the fabric of our world art everything, withstand such things that we behold every day? Something was protecting us. I prayed to it every night for guidance, and I never heard its voice again. I had been touched by God once, and that was a lifetime of fortune in one moment. When I changed the color of the nameplate on my desk just by hitting save on a text file, I realized something. The fabric of all things was open to me. I could put this power away, show you, conceal it, but... What if this was what saved me? What if this was what saves us all, every day, from the abyssal terrors that rip and rend at our world's fragile stability? What if me hitting save on a text file was the birth of God? If it's not, then I tried. If it is, then I'm watching. I will try to steer things right. It will take time. Wish me luck. S. Andrew Swan's Proposal Not all 01 proposals have to be scary or sad. Sometimes they can make you think about what your role is in all this. And with that we come to S. Andrew Swan's Proposal. It's my favorite, and the favorite of many authors on the side. It's one of the highest rated as well, and it doesn't really need much explanation. The description is entirely expunged. The containment procedures let you know that whatever it is, it's an existential threat to the universe. And then, you find a hidden message. Ask yourself if you want to know. If the answer is no, then you might need to stop reading now. If you go and report this unauthorized file to your superiors, act contrite, and claim that you only read to this paragraph. You might get away with a Class A amnestic, if you're lucky. And if the O5s aren't particularly paranoid at the moment. So you want to know what SCP-001 is? The first answer is that it was a placeholder, a theoretical designation for the prime cause, the ultimate reason for all the paranormal crap we deal with on a daily basis. SCP-001 is why we have to deal with omnicidal reptiles, ever-expanding rooms, extra-dimensional pools of red goop, and consumer products that don't obey the normal laws of physics. Of course, given that all these things, as dangerous and deadly and just plain insane as they are, are inherently patternless and self-contradictory, most researchers are convinced there is no possible unifying principle for them all, much less a common source. They're wrong. There's more than one reason that cross-testing is discouraged in the O5s, even look down on excessive cross-referencing of SCPs. The O5s don't want any one group looking at more than a handful of these things at once, because of what was discovered when the Foundation tried to develop a grand unified theory of SCPs. That research is mostly gone now. Site-001 Alpha was dismantled, scrubbed from the archives, the staff mind-wiped and reassigned. No one left but me, and I wouldn't know anything if it wasn't my habit of not trusting the Foundation's servers and having my own hidden personal archive the O5s missed in their panic. I was a data analyst at Site-001 Alpha. Note to O5 command, don't bother looking for me. I finished the job you started. The identities of all former staff at Site-001 Alpha have been completely scrubbed from the records. You know as much as they do now. And I participated in the first and only attempt to consolidate all Foundation data on all SCPs. I was in charge of data integrity. And as much of a mess as you might think that was, it was an order of magnitude worse. Forget the memetic SCPs or the ones that modify their own description, or the ones that seem to only inhabit info space and slip into the database to wreak havoc. That's all SOP for anyone who works with the Foundation's network, just a matter of scale. Worse, the completely inexplicable unexpected changes in data. Sorry, that's wrong, even though I can't help but thinking it that way. It isn't a change in data when reality is shifting to match. I don't know a lot about the internals of the software we used, but I know that part of it ran outside of what we think of as the real world. And at first, everyone thought that the audit trails it produced were some sort of bug. However, it became apparent that the nature of the software, its purposeful isolation from the narrative affecting SCPs, allowed it to record something far more important. It's not visible to you, or the O5s, or even most of the SCPs we deal with, but the Foundation, and by extension the entire universe, is in a state of constant shifting reality flux. SCP files appear and disappear from our database with alarming regularity. And the SCPs referred to, to all appearance, appeared and disappeared along with them. Not just SCPs, but personnel, whole sites. An entire decades of the Foundation's history would be rewritten, seemingly at random. And our own memories, and all external research, would confirm that objective reality matched the current version in our database. One of the researchers told me that it was like we were seeing the effect of something like SCP-140, only on a much larger scale. Yeah, something a lot like SCP-140 and infinitely larger in scale. I don't know who did the analysis, and if I did I wouldn't say. She's probably a lot happier not knowing about her own discovery. But she looked at what vanished and what appeared and what subtly changed in the records, and she found a pattern. The drift towards darkness, towards narrative coherence, toward the plot. Everyone who works any length of time at the Foundation knows the universe we live in is a seriously fucked up place. Those of us who still believe in God tend towards serious ambivalence about his handiwork. But we found out there is a God, and it is SCP-001. And it's a bunch of horror writers. You made it all the way to the end. My name is Christopher Clayton Morris, though you may know me better under the pseudonym Dr. Sumerian. This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 Sharelike Attribution Unported License. This podcast featured the following works, all of which are under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Sharelike License. SCP-001 by LT Massapag Jonathan Ball's Proposal, originally posted on the SCP Wiki by LT Massapag Dr. Gears Proposal by Dr. Gears Dr. Clef's Proposal by Dr. Clef Kate McTerris' Proposal by Kate McTerris An S. Andrew Swan's Proposal by S. Andrew Swan This podcast featured the following songs in chronological order. A Human Being by Andy G. Cohen From the 2016 album Through the Lens Licensed Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Take Me Higher by Jazar From the 2014 album Tumbling Dishes Like Old Man Wishes Licensed Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Sharelike Manly None Steps Out by Dr. Turtle From the 2016 album Jonah's Message for New York Licensed Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Bath in Fine Dust by Andy G. Cohen From the 2017 album Moll Slash Div Licensed Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Oxygen Mask by Andy G. Cohen From the 2017 album Moll Slash Div Licensed Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution You are currently listening to that kid in the fourth grade who really liked the Denver Broncos by Chris Zabriski from the album Undercover Vampire Policeman Licensed Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Thanks for listening. The Candle Flame Gutters Its Little Pool of Light Trumbles Darkness Gathers The Demons Begin to Stir Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World Appliance as a Candle in the Dark 1995